Category Archives: Social Engagement

(Author’s note: Except where noted, all thoughts and ideas in this post are mine and have been synthesized over the years through my interest and reading on the topic of gender and sexuality. The bulk of the source texts are included in a bibliography at the end of this essay. There are also links to relevant podcasts, websites and movies. Throughout the essay I link to various sites and articles that are relevant to the statements being made. A great deal of what I’ve written has been said by others, but it bears repeating since we haven’t seemed to learn anything yet.)

This autumn has been fascinating regarding the surge in social awareness of sexual harassment and sexual assault, as well as its deep, far reaching impacts not only on the lives and careers of women, but on the awareness and consciousness of men who had previously been unaware or willfully blind to the prevalence of it in women’s lives.

In my various social media feeds, I’ve seen a number of women who have shared the #metoo hashtag. Some have also shared their stories of sexual harassment or assault. Most, however, have not shared their stories, and I think that speaks more to the way society reacts to and treats women who call out the harassers and victimizers than to these women’s courage or veracity. Women don’t owe us their horror stories, after all. Even in this current, more sensitive climate exposing inappropriate behavior by men, especially popular or powerful men, will often lead to these women blamed for somehow “enticing” the assault by the way they acted or dressed.

A few men have joined in with their own stories of sexual harassment and assault at the hands of other men and some women (yeah, it happens). Although less frequent, the sexual harassment and assault of men (usually by other men) should be kept in mind the further I get into this essay. Men can be victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. However, the more common male hashtags in response to #metoo wave have been hash tags meant to pledge to do better by speaking up when they witness sexual harassment, or hashtags meant to confess guilt at having been silent in the face of sexual harassment, or even for having engaged in such behavior.

It’s good to see this social media confession spree; however, amid all these confessions by women who’ve been harassed and assaulted, and these confessions by men who are feeling ashamed for having ignored harassment, I also tend to see a lot of men express their shock or surprise that so many women they know have been sexually harassed, or assaulted.

I can’t say that I’m really all that shocked, or surprised by the number. I don’t write that to give the impression that I’m somehow wiser than most. The truth is that for over a year or more, I’ve been following the Tumblr “When Women Refuse,” which posts stories from the news as well as personal stories submitted by readers about sexual harassment and violence that they’ve experienced. Reading the blog is a harrowing and gut-wrenching experience. It has lead me to believe that, long before Trump was elected or Weinstein, Roy Moore, Al Franken, and Charlie Rose were exposed, that almost every woman I know could probably submit a story. Maybe it would be nothing more than a story about a boy who yanked her ponytail on the playground in fifth grade after she refused to hold his hand, something most might think of as minor – that is if we don’t dismiss it as a meaningless display of “boys-will-be-boys” behavior. Either way, it is still a girl being punished by a boy for not accepting his advances. That pony-tail yank can sometimes, without rational adult intervention (more on this later), turn to snapping a girl’s bra strap, which then can metastasize into something more serious later in life. All it takes is a little bit of empathy and imagination to see that if it happens once, it happens many times.

For most of my life, post-puberty, my closest friends have been women. That’s been the case even in spite of my own failures to avoid certain sexist behaviors. I remember the light bulb revelation sometime when I was in high school or college that rape wasn’t about sex, but that it was about power and violence (yes, a young woman friend clued me in on this matter). The unfortunate thing was that despite that shift in understanding, I still didn’t (and perhaps still don’t) understand the “why” of sexual harassment and sexual assault. If it were just about power and violence wouldn’t a simple beating or a murder suffice to meet the perpetrator’s need to display his power, or enact his violence? Why does this particular type of violence involve, or, even, perhaps, require, the outward performance of acts that can be interpreted as sex?

I suspect there’s a lot more to it than what is generally speculated about on in the media. This essay isn’t an attempt to fill that gap, but instead an attempt to point to some of what I think are the root causes of men harassing and assaulting women. A lot of these thoughts are my own, synthesized from a great deal of personal introspection and a fair bit of reading. A bibliography has been provided at the end of the essay; however, I only quote directly from one book.

Professor Sam Keen published Fire In The Belly: On Being a Man in 1992, and, in some ways, it seems almost to have been a good twenty-five years ahead of the times. In the early 90s it was eclipsed in popularity by Robert Bly’s Iron John, and the drum pounding nature retreats that Bly’s “masculine” fairy tales encouraged. Keen’s thoughtful philosophical work was also eclipsed in public notice by the simultaneous rise of groups like the Promise Keepers, which promoted Biblical manhood (read: traditional male gender role with increased benevolent sexism), and then mutated by the so-called “men’s rights” activists who seem to have only paid attention to Keen’s idea of the power of mythological “WOMAN” to control men’s lives, and then promptly forgot that Keen clearly and directly stated he was speaking of an idealized, metaphorical, and mythological “WOMAN” (hence the all-caps and quotes formatting which I’m borrowing). That mythic “WOMAN” only exists in men’s imaginations, and it leads these men’s rights douches to decide that somehow, Patriarchy really means real-life women secretly control and manipulate men and society if geared for women’s benefit.

If anything, that short breakdown should make it clear that men are, indeed, searching for something to help clarify and understand their role in society, even if they’re getting it wrong (sexual harassment and sexual assault are just one of the symptoms of any patriarchal system, and they get worse the more toxic the system gets). Part of why so many men are getting it wrong, of course, will be clearer later in this essay, but until then, let’s return to Keen and his philosophy.

Keen’s book was important to my inevitable, albeit slow and still incomplete, maturity into manhood. I’ve returned to it occasionally over the years to read passages, but I’ve never treated it the way some men treat certain business books, or the Bible, as, well, a bible. Some of the criticism leveled at Keen’s book back in the day was that it seemed too much like a personal philosophy than a piece of researched scholarly work – as if Keen hadn’t, indeed, intended it to be a personal philosophy and therefore, somehow, missed the mark at explaining or elucidating any incontrovertible fact about manhood and providing the tools to fix it. As Keen felt, I too feel that the broad, social construction that is manhood can’t be altered by some joint, collective, uniform approach. It has to start from a very personal space because with men, we have, in a way, amputated them from their personhood and reclaiming that is needed before men can band together in a group to affect change, otherwise the same problems will arise again.

In the same vein as Keen, I have been more interested developing my own philosophy of manhood. Then, once I have something that makes sense for me, I’ll share it as a kind of guide rather than a rule book. This personal philosophy approach should make sense if we keep two things in mind: 1) masculinity, in the past, may have touted the “self-made-man” ideal, but the truth is manhood is predominantly about conformity and uniformity, and 2) that conformity has lead us to this toxic, barren version of manhood in America and the only way to break it is for each man to go on a personal journey and bring back talismans that others can use to guide them on their own journeys. Think of this as a Knights of the Round Table approach. When the Knights set out to find the Grail in order to heal King Arthur and save Camelot, the story says that each knight entered the dark forest at the place of his own choosing. It might seem ironic, but think about it this way: our current patriarchal system tells us we should be self-made men, independent, rugged individualists, and so on, but part of the reason sexual harassment and assault are so prevalent is because modern American manhood demands uniformity, conformity, and silence. Each man thinks of himself as unique, separate from all other men, and yet he’s adhering to a vague and shifting ideology of manhood that relies on the approval and acceptance of other men. The Knights in the Arthurian legends actually do the opposite. They each obey a clear, set, and well-defined code, which requires them to each follow their own separate path with the expectation that what they learn or discover will be brought back to the Round Table and shared.

I’ll try to discuss that more at the end of the essay.

Now, in light of current events (mass shootings, revelations of “male feminist” failures, and sexual harassment accusations in politics and media), I recently went back to Fire in The Belly because I remember Keen having some thoughts on why men commit sexual assault on women that none of the hashtags and pledges ever seemed to get at, which is that root cause. Instead, most posts and comments go for the simple and obvious “men need to stop doing this and change.” Yes, of course, men need to change, and they need to stop feeling so entitled to a woman’s body that they sexually harass women, or commit sexual assault, but to do more than treat the symptom, we need to think about WHY men feel that way and HOW they can change it.

Now, I remember trying to convey the gist of Keen’s book to friends back when I was an undergrad, and the ideas were new to me. I generally failed to get the point across. One of the problems with those early conversations was that I, and my audience, made several argumentative mistakes that none of us seemed capable of overcoming. First, we failed to acknowledge that there is a distortion between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is. There are a host of unwritten rules, expectations, and myths that make up our society, and which inform and, in fact, build that distortion between the idealized world and the real world that we often can’t penetrate enough to see clearly.

So, as an example, in our idealized world, rape should be a universally bad thing that rarely occurs and rapists are bad people who look the part. Also in our idealized world, rapists are punished. In reality, rape is common, and rapists go unpunished or are lightly punished, and most people refuse to see that those nice clean-cut, “all-American” boys from the well-to-do families that go to church every Sunday are exactly the kind of boys who harass women and commit sexual assault. Creating the distortion between those two points are all these unspoken patriarchal constructs that are in place to defend and justify the male aggressor’s behavior (she was “asking for it” because of the way she was dressed, because she drank too much, because men can’t control themselves around immoral or immodest women, etc.), which also serve to terrorize women with the constant fear of rape.

Here’s another example: in our idealized world, war would occur rarely, have clear lines between good guys and bad guys, be swift and decisive and not involve or overly affect non-combatants. In reality, war is common, almost our perpetual human condition, and the lines between good and evil are blurry, manufactured, propagandized, and often false. War involves the whole population, and is often waged on civilians. Also, even though most militaries are now gender mixed with men and women volunteering and serving together in all combat roles (the US Military opened all combat roles to women in 2015), the unspoken constructs that make up the distortion between those two poles tell us that men are the designated warriors, and that they must be ready and willing at all times to fight, kill, and die on behalf of their country and to “protect the women and children.”

It’s this second example that will start us off because, like Keen, I think our constant state of war, among other things, has a rather significant bearing on the first example. However, before we get too far into the weeds of it, let’s make sure we have some ground rules and boundaries in place. I want to make sure we understand that we’re going to spend a great deal of time discussing those unspoken, received myths of Patriarchal manhood and the expectations and ideas that get fed to boys and young men and how those ideas, whether they come to us pure and clearly understood, or mutated, warped, misinterpreted, unexamined, and perhaps even misunderstood, affect how men act in the real world.

I also want to make it clear that this is not a defense of those boys and men who sexually harass and assault women, but an exploration of the possiblemotivations for committing those acts. As a person with a solidly developed sense of empathy who has come to believe women who say they have been harassed, assaulted or raped by the men they accuse, it’s equally important for me to try to explain to myself and understand how another man who, at least externally, resembles me can act with such a lack of empathy and compassion toward women. In other words, I’m trying to figure out why men do this without landing on the notion that it is somehow due to an innate, inbred, unavoidable animalistic evilness within us, which would then paint all men as barely controlled and unredeemable beasts.

So, first, let’s see if we can establish a few “known-knowns” to keep the speculations and theories proposed below firmly couched in their appropriate field of view, and, hopefully, also help us avoid a slew of personal exceptions that might be proposed as an attempt to negate the general experience. Which is to say men, in general feel certain pressures to compete, to be aggressive, and to be able to fight, even if someone’s little brother doesn’t specifically feel pressured to fight with other boys. Or, to paraphrase a Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert joke, we haven’t solved the problem of world hunger just because you had a sandwich today. So, just because your father/brother/husband is a non-competitive pacifist doesn’t mean the social pressures and patriarchal mythologies I’m going to talk about are imaginary or obsolete – nor does that mean that your father/brother/husband hasn’t felt some version of these social pressures to be a certain type of “man.”

So, our “known-knowns”

The imagined fear of something and the fear we feel when that something actually occurs will always be unequal, but until the thing we fear occurs, that rationalization is irrelevant.

Most, if not all, of the speculations to follow with be gender normative and heterosexual.

This essay is not about comparative misery, one-ups-manship, or “men’s expectations are worse than women’s” whininess. Feminism has acknowledged that patriarchy damages men as well. This essay is presented as a thought process, looking at the ways patriarchy’s damaging expectations of men ultimately affect women.

Keep “Dual inheritance theory” or “gene-culture co-evolution” in mind. In short, it is that genetic and cultural evolution interact. We have arrived at this toxic version of manhood over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. It will take more than a generation or two to fully change course.

Sexual harassment and sexual assault disproportionately affect to women, but men are also sexually harassed and assaulted. According to RAINN someone experiences sexual violence every 98 seconds, and only 6 out of every 1,000 rapists will see jail time.

The United States has the largest military budget in the world. We are a nation of WAR and we are armed to the teeth, so even if a man has never been in the military, our society has trained him to be a combatant, and provided the motivation to view the world around him as constantly dangerous.

As stated above, the US Military only began allowing women to serve in all combat roles in 2015.

Despite that, yes, women have been warriors and soldiers. Recent archeological evidence has proven a number of Viking warriors were women; however, women are generally NOT a society’s designated warriors. The designated warriors have been men. It’s part of the Patriarchal system, it was also a coldly logical choice: on average, men are larger, stronger and, from an evolutionary standpoint, less individually valuable to society. Men in a patriarchy are actually most valuable as a collective, a team, a unit. To put it bluntly men are most valuable to society at war as expendable canon fodder.

America ended military conscription and transitioned to an all volunteer force in 1973, so, it’s only been forty-four years since American men were relieved of the actual threat of conscription.

Despite that, men are still the only members of American society required to register for Selective Service, which means that if a draft is reinstated, ONLY men will be involuntarily conscripted into military service. Also, men who knowingly fail to register, even now in peace time, face jail sentences.

Just as sexual harassment and assault make women feel that their bodies are not their own, conscription and military service also means a man’s body is not his own. It belongs to the state if and when the state deems it necessary to put his body to use defending the state’s political and militaristic ends. But, even in civilian settings, men often willingly take physically dangerous jobs to support themselves and their families. Here’s a Washington Post article from 2015 on the deadliest jobs in America.

War wounded always outnumber war dead and the number of sexual assault survivors outnumber those who die from sexual assault. It is the aftermath of surviving these things that is more fearful than dying. Both war wounded and sexual assault survivors suffer deep emotional trauma. It is a pointless endeavor to try to quantify which is physically more traumatic to the victim.

War victimizes everyone, men, women, and children, but the first victims are the raw recruits we train to kill.

The training to kill starts early, in fact it starts the first time we tell a boy to suppress his pain, to be strong and fearless when he feels weak and fearful. It starts when we are slower to react to a boy’s distress than to his sister’s distress, and when we dismiss intemperate behavior in boys that we repress in girls (see this Newsweek article, or this article from the APA on how dads treat sons and daughter differently, or this piece about mothers treating sons and daughters differently).

In other words: a society that tells boys to ignore their own pain, trains them to ignore other people’s pain, and a society that trains boys for violence will be a violent society.

Now that we’ve got the Known-Knowns out of the way, here is a passage from Fire In The Belly that might be the best place to start:

Short of some theory that attributes violence to the innate sinfulness of men, the only way we can make sense of this propensity to brutalize women is by looking for the factors that cause men to be violent. We must assume, as they say about computers, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Violence in, violence out. Men are violent because of the systematic violence done to their bodies and spirits. Being hurt they become hurters. In the overall picture male violence toward women is far less than male violence against other males. […] What we have refused to acknowledge is that these outrages are a structural part of a warfare system that victimizes both men and women. […]

[…] In the old war code, warriors were expendable but women and children were to be protected behind the shield. Granted, the sanctity of innocence was violated as often as it was respected in warfare. The point is: no one even suggested that men’s lives have a claim to the sanctity and protection afforded, in theory, to women and children. It is wrong to kill women and children but men are legitimate candidates for systematic slaughter – cannon fodder [Keen, p. 46 (underlined emphasis is mine)].

America has been an independent nation for 241+ years, and we’ve been at war over 90% of the time. Here’s an article from a few years ago breaking it down. We’ve now been engaged in some form of military action 224 years out of 241. Here’s a list. Keen wrote those words above after the first Gulf War (August 1990 to January 1991). At that time, the US hadn’t engaged in any protracted combat with massive troop deployments since Vietnam. When I quoted that passage to people before, I often got incredulous looks, and doubtful “I don’t know, man” comments. Now, after the War in Iraq and the ongoing war in Afghanistan I wonder if those same people would feel the same way. I wonder if any of the people I went to college with have children who are veterans of those wars.

It feels true to me that the Patriarchal war system leads to sexual harassment and sexual assault. So, to me, it seems that failing to talk about the emotional trauma done to boys under the guise of making them into men, we continue to perpetuate that emotional trauma out toward the world. Now, let’s be clear: I am not suggesting that we be lenient with boys and men who commit these kind of crimes (harassment, assault, rape) or feel sorry for them because they were told not to cry as children. That’s the “boys-will-be-boys” route we’re already on. In fact, the first step to curbing our rape culture, which reveals itself every time a woman is sexually harassed – and fulfills itself when she is, at last, assaulted – is to begin appropriately pushing boys and men who commit these acts (we will get into a longer discussion of the misuse of sexual offender registries later). But, we should all know that punishment is not always the best solution since it is not often an effective deterrent (see this piece on the ineffectiveness of the death penalty to deter violent crime). We must begin to address the source, the root cause, as if it were any other kind of disease. Punishment alone only treats the symptoms, it doesn’t solve the problem.

We have to do some hard work to change what it means to be a man. We have to start to change how we raise boys, and we have to be patient (and we can only be patient if we have fair punishment, i.e., Brock Turner should have served more time in jail, and Donald Trump shouldn’t be President).

So, what does it mean to be a man these days?

From an early age we’re told vaguely to “be a man,” but what we’re not really told how to accomplish that. I believe it meant something different to my father at different stages in his life than it means to me at similar stages in my life (some of which I have not experienced, such as being a husband and father). My father never sat me down and gave me a specific guide on how to be a man. Most of my concepts of manhood came from attempting to interpret my father’s implied directions and his behavior, followed by observing other men such as my uncles (a construction worker, a mechanic, an insurance salesman, and a doctor), my grandfathers (one a kind of jack-of-all-trades, the other a minister), my teachers, and my coaches. After that, I looked to the men in the books I read and the movies and TV shows I watched, both real men and fictional men, and paid attention to what girls and women said they wanted or liked, especially my mother. And then, worst of all, I took cues from the boys around me who were cobbling together their own concept and interpretation of “being a man” in the same fashion I was. There is a passage from William Kennedy’s novel Quinn’s Book that always comes to mind when I think about how boys learn to be men, and it reads: “Women handed their wisdom on to each other, but boys were supposed to discover the secrets of life from watching dogs fuck.”

Because the pattern is common, perhaps even more so for boys without present fathers, it’s common for men to have absorbed wildly disparate (and perhaps even conflicting) models of manhood; however, each model holds to certain categories by which all men measure themselves: War. Work. Sex. Or to put it more simply and crudely; Fighting. Laboring. Fucking.

Some of what comes next will, and should, seem obvious.

WAR

War, at it’s most reduced, is a competition. Despite the old adage that there are no winners in war, the fact is, for most of recorded history, the “survivors” – especially those labelled the “victors” – were the stronger and more skilled fighters. Survivors who weren’t labelled “victors” but instead the “defeated” were merely lucky, or worse, seen as cowards – especially if you take the Spartans adage, “come home with your shield or on it,” to be a measure of soldierly duty and courage. Win or die trying. And so, there is, even in our current view of manhood, the accepted knowledge that to gain skill and merit as a “warrior” is to be seen as a “man,” and so we must win battles whether real or metaphorical. Outside of the high stakes conditions of actual combat, the practice field for warriors is, of course, the practice fields and competition arenas of sport, so, war and sport is where we’ll start.

Despite today’s fairness rules in youth team sports, despite “participation trophies,” despite coaches touting the non-competitive aspects of sport like teamwork, companionship and “character building,” sport is still understood to be a competition of strength and dominance – just like combat. In fact, those ideas of teamwork, companionship, and character touted as the benefits of youth team sports – especially team sports like football – are the very aspects later pushed as the militaristic values of a good soldier.

They aren’t bad values by any means. They’re also important to building a functional, just, open, and peaceful society. However, when a society is geared toward war, as our patriarchal, American military industrial society is, then those values can easily become a source of toxicity. Teamwork, companionship, and, character are often interpreted and enforced as conformity, obedience, and silence – and the degree to which men conform, obey, and remain silent about the ways that their conformity and obedience are enforced then becomes the measure of their supposed “character,” or “honor” even as those words completely lose their meaning in the real world.

We see this warped sense of “honor” when cops close ranks around an officer who shoots an unarmed civilian, and why whistle blowers, even in the corporate world, often face retaliation for breaking the code of silence. If you’d like a good example of this in a less secretive environment, but one directly relevant, take a look at the Richie Incognito bullying scandal in the NFL from a few years ago. Incognito was supposedly directed by coaches to “toughen up” fellow player Jonathan Martin, and he attempted to do so by using racial slurs and death threats, including threats directed at Martin’s family. It seems to echo, in a way, the treatment of Private Pyle in the movie Full Metal Jacket. In both situations, a man has been determined by other men to have fallen short of the masculine ideal. So, a leader, along with the man’s teammates, apply force and violence to toughen up the supposedly ‘weaker’ male. Other players had to have witnessed Incognito’s attacks on Martin, just as Pyle’s fellow recruits witnessed the abuse heaped on Pyle by the Drill Sergeant, and later by his fellow recruits. In Full Metal Jacket, you get to see the moral dilemma in the Joker character during the scene where the platoon beats Pyle with bars of soap wrapped in towels. At first, Joker appears reluctant to do it (he’s the last man in line), but eventually he unleashes a series of blows that seem, because of his initial reluctance, to be even more vicious than the others.

And just like in Full Metal Jacket, no one in the Incognito case, including other victims, came forward to stop it. In the Incognito case, nothing happened until after it was exposed by ESPN. In our fictional example from Full Metal Jacket, no one reported the violence done to Pyle until he snapped violently and killed the Drill Sergeant and then himself.

Male conformity to the “team” (whether it is in sport, or the military) is the primary measure of men in a militaristic society, and it is almost always enforced with violence, whether physical or verbal, actual or implied. Reason, logic, or rational persuasion is not considered to be that useful, especially in a militaristic situation where a soldier’s obedience and conformity to command is often seen as the very thing that will allow the team succeed, or the platoon to survive. It should be easy to see how that silent conformity to a violent system can bleed out into the general population, especially when we fetishize military service as making one automatically heroic, and idolize football players.

The problem with fetishizing military service, is that we also begin to fetishize those easy to warp and easy to misinterpret values of the soldier. We then begin to apply them where they shouldn’t be applied – at least not with the same force or with the same goals. In non-military situations, such as civilian law enforcement, if we adopt militaristic versions of those values of duty, honor, courage (teamwork, companionship, character – or, rather, obedience, conformity, and silence), then someone has to be cast as an enemy – someone with whom we do combat. “Criminals” is a rather vague enemy, especially when, in reality, overall crime rates are dropping, and it’s always been hard to tell criminals from civilians.

Now, we could get into the influence of for-profit prisons on aggressive policing and the resulting incarceration rates, but these are, ultimately, deeper symptoms of the problem that is the unfettered adulation of capitalism and privatization that seeks to turn every aspect of the human experience into a profit center. But that’s a bit off-track, and more suited to the section on Work.

So, let’s roll this back a bit and ask what the common denominator is. I think it’s this: when confronted with a problem (terrorism, crime, drugs, etc.) the patriarchal American solution is violence – to “go to war” against it. When a society goes to war against something, whether literally or figuratively, there has to be, inevitably, an enemy. And, in order to effectively target that enemy, the soldier (or the cop) has to operate with a certain lack of empathy, or at least a very narrow sense of empathy that is confined and directed only to those seen to be on the same team.

Now, in a patriarchal society geared toward war and ready to fight, it’s the males who have been designated as the warriors and so they – the warriors – have to be socialized to employ violence. The first step to weaponize a male is to cripple his sense of empathy so that he will have the kind of detachment needed to enact violence – a warrior cannot see his enemy as wholly human. The second step is then to encourage his aggression through sports, and games. The US Army has even developed a first person shooter video game billed as providing a “virtual soldier experience” called – what else – America’s Army. Our tax dollars pay for it and it’s distributed for free. The Marines have one, too, called “Close Combat: First to Fight.”

Neurologists have pointed out a number of broad, generalized, and fundamental differences between male and female brains, but remember, these differences are not the source of our problem. If they were, we would be arguing exactly that sexual harassment and sexual assault arise from an innate male sinfulness, rather than a socially acquired dysfunction. Boys and girls brains may be structured differently, function differently, and process emotions differently, but it doesn’t mean boys are incapable of the same kind of emotional and empathetic depth as girls. A boy has to be broken down and rebuilt as a weapon throughout his life in order to acquire that balance between a civilized, socially integrated and functional civilian while still being empathetically stunted enough that he can kill another human being when that society asks it of him.

If you’re interested in how the military takes young men and makes them killers, head to the library and read On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. Don’t buy it, though. The dude makes enough money off his Killology seminars. Grossman is one of the leading proponents of the “warrior cop” mentality, which leads to the kind of trouble we saw in Ferguson, MO. Here’s a Washington Post article about the course he gives to cops. By becoming an expert at understanding how to get people (especially young men) to kill, he has become the chief pusher of a hyper violent subculture in police forces across the country.

Another thing we train boys to do from childhood is to suppress or deny their softer, or more gentle emotions. Suppressing one’s emotions is especially useful if a society is breeding men for violence. If showing certain emotions is unmanly, or “girly,” then men often react to those emotions with anger, and violence, in order to deflect and reassert their manliness. It conditions them to solve problems with aggression, which is necessary only on battlefields.

That was a long walk, but to put it simply, America prioritizes war (point 4 above), which means we prioritize soldiers, and the primary function of a soldier is to enact violence. Also, despite our military now allowing women in all combat roles, men are still the majority of soldiers (here’s an article on the number of women in service in 2013 showing women made up only 14% of our 1.4 million member military), and guess where there’s a lot of sexual assault: the military.

I want to point again to #5 above. Prior to 2015, women were allowed into aerial combat rolls only in 1992, and before that, women were allowed to serve in the military, but only in non-combat roles. If they did see combat it was incidental to their primary roles. Now, what I find interesting about that 2015 article from Aviation Week, was the quote from General Merrill McPeak: “Personally, I am not eager to increase exposure of our women to additional risk.” There’s a paternal protectiveness to that statement that women will recognize right away (and see as ironic considering the stats on sexual assault among women in the military at the hands of their fellow soldiers). But, remember, we’re dealing with that distortion that hangs between the real world and the world that’s in our heads

Now, let’s take a step back and reset for a moment.

In the real world, sexual harassment and sexual assault strip women of a sense of ownership of their own bodies. What is violently ironic about that is that in our patriarchal war system, a man’s duty is to protect women from being violated in that way. This is one of the many, many reasons why sexual harassment and sexual assault are such betrayals. What then makes that betrayal deeper is that the patriarchal war system can’t really punishthe man for violating his obligation to protect because that would rattle loose the narrative we are being asked to buy into, which is that men are supposed to protect women (or at least “our own women” – and yes, you should hear overtones of racism in that). So, if a woman is harassed or assaulted society blames the victim for tempting or enflaming the man. He would have protected her if she hadn’t lead him on, if she hadn’t worn that dress, if she hadn’t drank too much, if only she’d been nice, etc..

In the real world, men and women serve together in the military, but in our patriarchal war model men are the ones raised with the expectation to voluntarily surrender ownership of their bodies– perhaps even their lives – to the state, and to protect the sanctity of those women whose domestic output is essential to that society’s survival. Then, on top of that, we automatically elevate men who put on uniforms to hero status while looking askance at men who take on helping jobs (especially if it’s a low paying job – more on this when we get to WORK).

Think about the subtle difference between women and men when it comes to this idea of body ownership: in a patriarchy, a girl’s body belongs to her father, and then to her husband, and women are told that these men will protect and honor her. Of course, in the real world, these men often don’t protect and honor them, and then random, individual men (seeming to function as a collective) seek to claim ownership of her body with cat calls, or worse (here a link to an episode of the Modern Love Podcast called “My Body Doesn’t Belong to You”). It’s easy to see how this treatment of women is a violation, that it’s disrespectful, humiliating, and inappropriate. But, in our patriarchal system, a man’s body is expected to be a shield and a weapon, and he is expected to sacrifice it to protect and defend his family, his home, his country. His ownership of his body is only an illusion generated by the fact that a patriarchy places him at the top of the hierarchy, which means that the only men who truly own their own bodies are those rich enough to pay some other, poorer man to fight and die for them.

Remember point #3 about this not being a comparative misery contest (and keep point #1 in your back pocket). I’m not suggesting that men’s sense of a lack of ownership of their bodies is worse or more severe than women’s. With an all volunteer military, and no draft currently in place, men who don’t serve in the military, or even in law enforcement, can indeed skate through life never feeling their body ownership stripped from them the way women do unless they, too, are sexually harassed or assaulted. But remember, those men do still feel pressure to put their bodies between danger and their families (again, not saying women don’t feel that, too, but society doesn’t expect a woman to die protecting her husband – maybe her children, but not her husband because its his job to die protecting her – which should be acknowledged as wildly ironic since a large percentage of murdered women are killed by domestic partners).

The point is simply this: we socialize girls with the notion that they will be protected and defended, basically that their body, even if it doesn’t “belong to them” is a valuable, sanctified and sacred thing (and then, yes, we violate that promise – repeatedly), but we socialize boys to be competitors and soldiers – warriors carrying weapons and shields into battle – which comes with no expectation of body autonomy or security and, certainly, as Keen pointed out, no sense of sanctity. A shield and a weapon are tools that belong to the tribe or the collective (as is the uterus, of course), and the purpose of those holding the shields and weapons is to fight, endure pain and suffering, and possibly die en-masse to protect, ostensibly, women (those whose uterus is ridiculously seen as belonging to the society). Men are valuable to a society only in the way ammunition is valuable to a soldier – it’s there to be used, spent, expended, consumed – loaded into the chamber and fired at the enemy.

In return for men’s mere willingness to suffer through war, to be treated like cannon fodder, they hope to be rewarded by those women whom they have promised to protect with their lives. That fantasy expectation, the reward for willingly offering themselves as a potential battlefield sacrifices, is what is at play when men react to a women’s rejection of their advances. You see, in order for anyone to be willing to risk life and permanent injury, they have to feel a sense of ownership within that society, and that sense of ownership includes owning the society’s most valuable resource, which is women – without whom a society could not survive into the future (someone has to gestate babies – and yeah, you should be sensing echoes of the religious right’s anti-choice stance there because a lack of cannon fodder for their holy wars is what they fear and the only way to ensure their own babies don’t die in war is to have a lot of poor dark babies willing to die for a promise that they’ll be able to get out of poverty by fighting). Ownership, of course, leads to a sense of entitlement, and that sense of entitlement leads to anger and violence when those men, whom society has cut off from any sense of empathy and trained to solve their problems with anger and violence, are told “No.”

Further bolstering that sense of entitlement, and of women being seen as reward for obedient sacrifice and service to the state or the tribe, is the sense of women as rightful compensation for having met the expectation that men be “good providers.”

That takes us to our Patriarchal Work system.

WORK

Work, like fighting, is another form of male competition, albeit a bit more civilized and abstract. And the rewards for working hard, for “footing the bill,” are the status symbols of a house, car, wife, etc.

When I was growing up in the 70s and early 80s it was still fairly common for married women to be stay-at-home mothers, although is was changing – and rapidly – as Reagan’s tax cuts began to undermine the middle class. My father supported the family on his own until 1982 or 83 working as a parole officer – a state employee – and my mother only went back to work after my sister entered the first grade. However, my father was still the primary breadwinner, and would remain so until their divorce. I once found an old pay stub from 1978 that showed he was able to support a family of four, own a home, and a car, on about $800 a month – or roughly $10,000 a year. By the time my parents divorced, they were, combined, making somewhere between $50k to $60K a year. They owned a home, two cars, and where helping me pay for college. That was 1995-ish. By 2017, I have to make $50K+ a year just to support myself and pay my student loans. I’ve never been married, have no children, and rent an apartment. I work with men younger than I am who are married, have kids and wives who stay at home in houses they own.

They’re younger than I am, but they feel like dinosaurs to me.

By the outward status symbols of our society, those men are more successful, they’re more viable mates, and generally better at the manly rights-of-passage than I am. We could discuss differing priorities between those men and me, or we could discuss our differing approaches to education – they went to college to gain a set of skills they could use to earn a large enough income (conforming to the social order), while I went to school to learn about writing and literature, philosophy and psychology, history and sociology (a life of the mind). But the real difference is, again, that liminal space where our patriarchal underpinnings distort our perception of the real world. Those young men squeezed themselves into the American manhood template as best they could whether they’re fully comfortable there or not (they all seem to have the same haircut even); however, I have tried (and often failed) to sidestep typical, patriarchal gender normative behavior and, consequently, it’s probably why I’m where I am today: still a bachelor and trying to be a writer of novels, while some men my age (46!) are already grandfathers.

Was that their dream when we were 16? To be a grandparent before 50? Who knows. It wasn’t mine.

Real world history is heavy laden, with stories of women’s dreams and aspirations being thwarted by patriarchal limitations. It’s not very often that our society shows us boys’ dreams being thwarted by the patriarchal system. In fact, if a boy grows up to be anything, really, whether it’s what he wanted to do when he was ten or something he stumbled into out of desperation, his path through life quickly gets absorbed into the patriarchal narrative to reaffirm the boy’s success as a man. In other words, if a boy at the age of 7 says he wants to be a major league center fielder, and does in fact grow up to be a major league centerfielder, then the patriarchal narrative of male merit has worked. But the boy who at 7 wants to be major league center fielder and instead ends up being a business systems analyst working 60 hours a week in a gray cubicle is also given a masculine success narrative – even if deep within himself he feels like a failure for not becoming the centerfielder. The decisions and the pressures that redirected him from centerfield to the cubicle farm will have certainly affected his psyche, his sense of personal authority, his sense of self-possession, and his sense of entitlement, especially since, the world at large will see him as a success and tell him he’s a success no matter what he feels. Society is telling him he’s doing manhood right, but judging from an article linked below, he’s done so by embracing work he sees as spiritually meaningless.

As a set of examples to both reinforce this generalization and show an exception (and to get us thinking about the effects) here’s a story about two men. One is a friend, the other used to be a friend. In high school, both young men wanted to be actors, and both were quite talented. Neither ended up going to college. Both of them instead got their girlfriends knocked up and got married either while in high school or just after (we’ll talk about sex as a measure of manhood later). One gave up his acting dreams and settled into a work-a-day job, is still married to the high school girl and has other kids after the first one (judging from Facebook pictures). The other took a gamble after a divorce from his child’s mother and then remarrying. He moved to New York to pursue acting because the example he wanted to set for his child was that of never giving up on one’s dreams. Now, here’s a seemingly non-sequitur question: which man do you think has a better perception of women?

This piece from the NY Times is on the differences in pay and job satisfaction between men and women. The bulk of the article points out that, for both genders, higher job satisfaction comes with higher pay, even though women are paid less. It points out that the overall pay gap, in general, can be explained by differences in career choices between men and women, but that, of course, does NOT explain the pay gap that exists in identical careers (that difference, of course, is sexism). What really caught my attention was the next to last paragraph, which stated that women were more likely to find their jobs, even when the pay is lower, to be more meaningful than men found their jobs to be.

I stumbled across that piece while trying to find an article I read a while back that was specifically about that kind of meaningful work issue. Sadly, I couldn’t find it, but the gist I remember pulling from it was basically what the last two paragraphs in the NY Times piece hint at: because the patriarchy has, historically, limited women’s roles to being isolated at home with kids, doing unpaid and unappreciated work, when women do enter the workforce, they tend (but of course not always) to get jobs that they find personally meaningful rather than simply lucrative.

Despite the real world fact that both husband and wife have to work these days, and despite the real world fact that most people (especially now) are working jobs simply to pay the rent, work, at least for certain white women, is still seen through our patriarchal system as a choice (as long as she has married the right man), and so women tend to pick work that feels more meaningful to them – at least when the opportunity appears. Men, because the patriarchal ideal (aided especially by religion in this case) tells them that they must be the primary breadwinners, the head of household, and that if they aren’t they’re failing as men, will often pick jobs based on the job’s lucrativeness over its meaningfulness. In fact, the only meaning a job has for most men seems to be derived from the money earned instead of the task performed, and whatever that man had once dreamed of being as a boy before he was subsumed into the patriarchy has been relegated to hobby, fond memory, or worse, source of resentment directed at anyone who seems to have gotten what they wanted. I wonder if any studies of domestic violence have considered the notion that one of the many sources of spousal abuse could arise from the husband feeling that he never got to do what he dreamed of doing because he felt he had to cast it aside to be provider and protector for his wife who, again, because of his perception being distorted by patriarchy, thinks has gotten exactly what she wanted (a good provider – the “man in the grey flannel suit” – and a brood of ungrateful kids). And so, dammit, if he’s unhappy with his life, she’s going to suffer, too.

Bear in mind, I’m not suggesting that women get to always follow their dreams. There are plenty of women who wanted to become singers or lawyers but ended up becoming nurses, or teachers, small business owners, or even stay-at-home-moms; however, when, even today, women struggle against the patriarchal assumption that all they want from life is to marry and have children, having any kind of career is a form of rebellion and therefore meaningful. So, despite the frustration women often express about unequal pay and the pressures of work and family balances (the need to be all and do all in the family and still get no respect), the fact that society doesn’t entirely recoil at career women in the same way it once did is a victory for Feminism. However, our cultural illusion, the patriarchal ideal we often don’t see laying over the real world, still portrays women who work as having made a choice to work rather than being required to work. Men are told it’s a requirement to work and their only choice in the matter is choosing what job they will try to acquire.

I bet there’s not a single professional athlete who wishes he’d become a lawyer, or a trash collector, but they’re outliers, not the norm. The norm for men is to find a job they can do, preferably one that pays well enough to support himself and a family, and then climb the promotional ladder until it’s time to retire, or until he dies, whichever comes first. Even though that is hard to do for most American men, it’s still possible – if he’s born into the right social class, doesn’t have massive student loan debt, and so on.

Work itself is banal. The expectation to work, at least in the real world, is becoming gender neutral. However, in the world as it is warped and distorted by those unspoken patriarchal expectations, work (at least when that “work” isn’t “fighting”) is the thing that most defines and categorizes men in our society, and the amount of money men earn sets their status and value to society and, in some cases, to women – or so we’re lead to believe by the patriarchal work system. So, despite the growing number of stay-at-home dads, despite the decline in the number of men who attend and graduate from college (nearly a requirement now for most high earning jobs that would allow men to support a non-working wife and their children) men still very often feel reduced to the size of their bank accounts. What they do and what they make becomes who they are whether they feel it has any meaning or not.

Go watch the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” through the lens of patriarchal work demands on men, through the lens of my story about the two would-be actors, and of men not finding meaningfulness in their work. Maybe it’s not a big loss that George Bailey never got to travel the world. In fact, the effectiveness of the movie relies on George’s dream being seen a ‘trivial” by the audience because if his dream had been to be a surgeon or a lawyer instead of a banker the story would feel a whole lot more shaky. The point is that this movie lays a patriarchal, masculine success narrative over a series of disappointments: trip to Europe thwarted by his father’s death, honeymoon thwarted by The Great Depression, solvency of the Building and Loan thwarted by Uncle Billy’s pride and thoughtlessness, which leads George to consider suicide because Mr. Potter (the only believable character to me, and, sadly, the most evil) points out George is worth more dead than alive. And even that is thwarted by a do-gooding angel who eventually gets his wings by manipulating George into staying alive. It’s only dumb luck that the town comes to his aid with the money to save the Building and Loan (money they’d already entrusted to him and Uncle Billy handed over to Mr. Potter – who kept it!). At the end, George is, basically, right back where he started before Uncle Billy gave away the money and “meaning” to his life has been retrofitted. In real life, George Bailey would either be dead, or he’d be out of business under those conditions, not signing Auld Lang Syne.

Wendell Jamieson summed up the movie this way in a 2008 N.Y. Times piece titled “Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life”when he wrote: “It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife.” That could just as easily describe life in a patriarchal system for men trapped in jobs they find meaningless and unrewarding. Then being cut off from empathy and emotional insight, they lack the vocabulary to express that despair and unhappiness. In cases like that, one of the ways they can give voice to that unhappiness, in addition to verbally or physically abusing those close to them, is to take refuge in the one activity society says they can take pleasure in: sex – or maybe even sexual manipulation (why does George force Mary to hide naked behind a bush?).

Now, let’s take a step back and reset. First, in the war system, our society attempts to cut men off from their emotions so that they will be able to fight and kill for the society when needed. We then require them to work, and the work system tells them that they must, through their work, be able to support a wife and family in order to be seen as “real” men. Then, in a capitalist system, we present work as competition – something we have already well trained boys to do. Smash together the violent competition of combat, whether on the battlefield or the sports field, and the aggressive economic competition of capitalism and our whole society begins to take on a feel similar to that of Charlie Sheen on a coke bender ranting about winning – and for that to be acceptable to society in general and men in particular, there has to be both praise and reward for all of this competition, sacrifice, and “winning,” otherwise the toll of meaningless work will send them all off a bridge. But what do men win by turning themselves into weapons to defeat rivals and tools to earn money regardless of what they might actually wish to do or be?

Well, they win a woman, of course. The more attractive the better because she is then an outward symbol of his ability to protect, his capacity to provide, and, of course, his dominance over other men. This particular dynamic is why women are frequently seen as property by men. Women in general, but more specifically, high status women, become something to acquire like a car, a house, a private jet, a yacht. It’s why rich white men regularly get divorced and marry a string of younger and more superficially beautiful women – and why they are called “Trophy Wives.”

In a work system that, especially after World War II and before Second Wave Feminism, aggressively excluded women from the public sphere and, even today, is still somewhat hostile to their presence outside of the “nurturing” careers, becoming a “trophy wife” might have seemed like a viable path to some semblance of financial security for women (it worked for Melania). The problem is that in our patriarchal, capitalist system, it makes a woman’s most marketable asset her body, rather than her intellect or any talent she has, and turns her into an object little different from a watch, or a car. That commodification of women tells men that, whether she is a madonna or a whore, every woman – every single one – in some fashion, has a price tag. Whether it’s a $50 for a blow job delivered from the passenger seat of a car parked in a dark alley, or a furtive 30 second blow job from a bored wife half the man’s age in the $5 million dollar home she’s been provided, for men enmeshed in the perpetual competition that is modern American Manhood, you get the woman (and blow job) you can afford.

This means that high status men and low status men sexually harass and sexually assault women for reasons that are different sides of the same entitled, patriarchal coin. The high status man who sexually harasses and assaults a woman is viewing her in the same way he might view any object he possesses or wishes to possess, which is that he can do with that object as he pleases as long as he’s willing to pay for her, her silence, if needed, or the damage he does. He believes he’s earned that right via his wealth and power. For the low status man, sexual harassment and sexual assault are exactly what we might assume them to be, threatening reminders of his patriarchal entitlement – he’s still a man after all, and she’s not. The low status man knows he can’t afford the woman he harasses or assaults, and so he’s stealing his sexual privilege back, or to put it another way, the patriarchal society has been telling him his whole life that he should be ready to sacrifice his body and possibly his life to protect women, and that he must work when he’d rather lounge about, but even if he does all of that and earns a woman, well, there’s has to have been some wishful thinking going on (perpetuated by the media) that will inevitably be thwarted and, out of those thwarted expectations comes a desire – perhaps not even fully understood – to remind those high status attractive women passing by on the street that however valuable they might think they are, he’s still a man, and she’s really nothing more than an object to be possessed and used by men.

Our patriarchal, war focused, capitalist society has so warped reality that women have become commodities, not people. Men are to take up arms to defend hearth and home (home being the domestic realm of women), and they are to go out in the world and labor, whether they find personal fulfillment or meaning in that labor or not, so that they can provide that hearth and home to a woman, which is his reward for all of this fighting and working, he is told. All of it is fantasy because, in the real world, the boy may dream of one day owning a Ferrari, or being married to a perfectly thin super hot model-like woman, but chances are he’s going to end up with a Toyota and a normal human woman. And yes, it’s dehumanizing to compare women and cars – but that’s the point I’m trying to make here: the system dehumanizes women by first dehumanizing boys through our socially restricting boys full emotional potential, and so we shouldn’t be that surprised when a man, having been trained his whole life to think that empathy is a weakness and emotions (except for anger) are for girls, doesn’t see the humanity in those around him and thinks he’s owed a smile or a fuck. Those are, after all, his rewards for dutifully fulfilling the requirements and obligations of American manhood.

And I’ve not even gotten to the actual sex part yet.

SEX

The final measure of a man in a patriarchal society is sex – or, rather more accurately, sexual conquest. Remember, in a war based, capitalist society, the total measure of male success is his willingness to compete, the desire and ability to achieve victory, and his dominance of anything and anyone that stands against him. And so, when it comes to sex, it’s actually possible for a man to never commit sexual harassment or assault, to be loyally monogamous, but still have a life devoid of any real intimacy with a woman because in this system, again, women are seen as little more than high priced masturbatory aids with heartbeats (for the ultimate WTF extension of that concept, take a look at the sexbot trend. Here are men so emotionally crippled by the system that they pick an actual object in the shape of a woman. There also is an interesting piece from Slate about Japan’s “herbivores,” young men who are avoiding the western ideal of manhood that Japan adopted after WWII and before their economy collapsed in the 1990s. Think of it as an interesting counterpoint, despite the social handwringing over population growth that the author (some of the interviewees) focuses on).

So, since we’re operating off known-known #2 (heteronormative), and it takes two to have sex, let’s start with the woman (ladies first….so patriarchal). In the real world, women are just as horny and interested in sex as men, and, in truth, might be more interested in it, that is if the research written about in books like Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, and What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner, continue to go the route the current evidence points down (women, after all, have a clitoris – an organ specifically dedicated to sexual pleasure – the penis is no less of an anatomical marvel, but it’s still a multi-purpose tool). In fact, if we look at the blur put onto the real world by our patriarchal underpinnings, then the research reported on and discussed in those two books – particularly when it comes to sex (at least healthy consenting sex) – suggests that we are in total denial and disarray about the reality of sex.

The research in the books mentioned, points to women responding to more widely varied and subtle sexual stimuli than men. Women are also more sexually fluid and flexible while men tend to be one-trick ponies, generally. Bisexual men do exist, of course, but the norm is for men to pick one thing and stick to it (whether they’re gay or straight), which is, possibly, one of the reasons men have more documented fetishes in the psychological literature than do women (another reason being that women’s sexuality – the truth of it anyway – is repressed by society. If you’re interested in female perversions and fetishes, read Female Perversions by Louise Kaplan).

However, our patriarchal system says women aren’t that interested in sex, aren’t “normally” promiscuous, and that they’re primary motivating interest is in finding a monogamous, domestic relationship that produces children, while men are raised to believe they must be the sexual and romantic instigators, that they’re prone to promiscuity (when research suggests they’re not), and so men should always turned on, and always looking to score.

And when does one “score?” During a competition, of course, and against an opponent who doesn’t want him to score.

In our warped patriarchal world, any woman who enjoys sex for its own sake, seeks it out, demands it, knows what she likes, and knows how to ask for it, is seen as threatening to the (male) social order. Whereas men, in this warped patriarchal system, are seen as “normal” – or normal-ish – even if they present themselves to the world as little more than a walking erection with a side-gig at an advertising firm. In our patriarchal system, male sexual behavior is mostly normalized (even its deviant forms like harassment and assault), while female sexual behavior is curtailed and confined to acceptable and safe arenas, i.e. the fantasy, kabuki theatre-esque, stunt-sex world of porn, or the church ordained, dutiful, procreative marriage. In fact, it might even be safe to say that male sexual behavior is hyper-normalized, and that we operate on the assumption that males after puberty will always welcome sex, and so if a male were to come forward to say he’d been sexually harassed or assaulted by a woman our response would be to laugh, or ask him if he was gay. Even when a female teacher has inappropriate sexual relations with an underaged male student, and gets convicted in a court, the male response often includes a lot of the old nudge-nudge wink-wink types of “Yeah it’s “illegal,” but I wish I’d been sexually “assaulted” by Mrs. X when I was in high school” jokes. In fact a number of the articles about these incidents don’t uniformly use the terms “sexual assault” or even “rape” when talking about these adult women and their teen boy victims, they use softer terms. One article was titled “Married Science Teacher, 22, Arrested for Sex Romp with Teen Boy Student” (my emphasis, but yeah Fox News). Sex romp. . . that sounds fun, doesn’t it? We’d all like to go on a (consensual) sex romp wouldn’t we? But that wouldn’t be how an article would be titled anywhere about a male teacher being sexually involved with an underaged female student.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we have some kind of 1-to-1 double standard here. It’s more subtle than that and maybe more complex. The difference between the female teacher/male student and male teacher/female student situation is all about how we view male and female sexual agency and desire. It’s about how we have completely infantilized and repressed female sexuality under the guise of purity and virtue, creating for women the nearly impossible to navigate line between madonna and whore, but how we’ve created for boys a hyper sexualized environment where having sex is a measure of their masculinity and where we both encourage them to pursue sex and take none of the responsibility for it, essentially telling them they are barely contained monsters kept in check only by female virtue.

We also tell these boys that female virtue will save them, and civilize them. The patriarchal view of women as either saintly mother, or debased whore is supposed to channel the patriarchal emphasis on male sexual conquest in appropriate directions – namely at the sacrificial “whore” – the woman who has no virtue to sully (because she likes sex for itself and women aren’t supposed to like sex for sex’s sake). The problem is that in the real world this whole madonna/whore thing is total rubbish and so men – again – crippled by society’s amputation of their empathy and the stunting of their emotional depth, are then further misled by Hollywood’s male fantasy dominated representations of sexual encounters and porn’s kabuki theatre unreality. Basically, they lack the ability to recognize women’s real interest or real lack of interest in sex, which means they inappropriately test the waters – to understate the whole issue of sexual harassment and sexual assault entirely.

America’s particular dynamic of sexual repression and delusion is especially strong because, as Dan Savage often says in The Savage Lovecast, we, unfortunately, got the Puritans during the European expansion into the New World. The Puritans, and other sects of Calvinist decent, were opposed to sex outside of marriage, and especially the idea of sex for anything other than procreation, and although one can point to researchers looking into the letters written between Puritan men and their wives to argue that the Puritans weren’t actually “anti-sex,” we should all be horribly familiar by now with the extreme amount of misinterpretation and deviation that occurs between church doctrine and church practice, as well as humanity’s willingness to shape their religious dogma into a means of controlling other people. So, the Puritans may have been, according to researchers like Francis Bremer (see this NY Post Article), passionate and attentive lovers with their spouses, their restriction of sex to marriage and procreation has been filtered through their spiritual descendant’s fear and insecurities about sexuality (particularly a fear of women’s sexuality) and then squeezed through whale bone corsets of the Victorian era’s prudishness to land us here, where we are consistently confronted with men who have no language to talk about sexual desire except what they learn in locker rooms and from porn, and who hold a sense of human sexuality that is 180 degrees opposite of reality. It’s a society where we’re so misinformed about and afraid of sex that it’s almost expected that anyone who rails against homosexuality, slutty women, abortion, birth control, premarital sex, porn, and children being molested in bathrooms by trans-men is sneaking off to do meth with a male hooker, bang a dude in his office, or traffic in children.

Now, we’re not here to go down the hypocritical preacher/politician route, but it is important to remember that we as a society have a problem with sex that goes much deeper than simply men behaving badly to women, and those deeper problems can complicate and distract us from the problems of sexual harassment and sexual assault (see the Kevin Spacey incident where after being accused of sexually assaulting a young co-star, he tried to deflect some of the blame onto his having been in the closet at the time – essentially trying to blame his gayness for his inappropriate behavior).

So, here we are, a sexually repressed society that also leads the world in the production of porn; a society that tries to push abstinence until marriage and the “naturalness” of monogamy, then uses overt sexual cues arising from our latent, repressed knowledge that sexual variety drives all of us, to sell everything from beer to cars, but plays it coy when advertising drugs for erectile dysfunction (WTF is up with the separate bathtubs, Cialis?); a society that tells women the protect their chastity, but pats boys on the back for successfully convincing as many women as he can to “give it up.”

I can’t count the number of times when I was growing up that I heard one of these old nuggets: “boys/men think about sex every seven minutes.” Or: “All boys ever think about is sex.” If those statements were true, how the fuck have I ever gotten anything done? In my youth, during the 80s in western Kansas, you were gay if you masturbated, which meant the only option was to find a girl to fuck. Fucking made you a man, and the more you fucked the more of a man you were – a stud. But, women weren’t supposed to want sex and so the dilemma began, which, of course, patriarchy attempts to give us a solution to – and a shitty one at that.

In that kind of environment, women, just like our opposition on the sporting field or battlefield, have to be “persuaded” to have sex, won over, conquered. We men have to have a sales pitch, and we aren’t supposed to take no for an answer. And, even though it’s the woman’s job to say no, to play coy, it’s our job as “men” to get her to give it up to us – often by any means necessary: lie (yes, I love you, respect you, want to marry you), cheat (I’ll just put the tip in), or steal (sexual assault, rape). In this toxic environment of a patriarchal, war centered, capitalistic system, a woman who says no too bluntly isn’t showing her proper appreciation for the actual or potential (that’s important to keep in mind – the “potential”) sacrifice the man is willing to make in order to provide and protect the valuable commodity that the woman represents, but if she says yes too quickly then she’s not valuable enough and so it’s perfectly ok to take advantage of her.

Or to adjust the focus a bit: we’ve crippled a boy’s ability to show and feel empathy, we’ve pushed him to embrace violence and aggression, limited his field of emotional expression to a few things like anger, rage, determination, then told him to push aside fear, gentleness, and softness as signs of weakness (read femininity). We then tell him the measure of his success as a man is to work a job, not for his own pleasure or satisfaction, not for any deeper meaning, but specifically to provide material comfort and security to a woman and the offspring she desires from him, and then we complicate that whole arrangement by also telling him the other measure of his manhood is the repeated and frequent use of his cock, which means his wife then has to turn into a Michelle Duggar-like baby factory, or he has to fuck women not his wife, which society says is bad, but really only if he gets caught.

Punishing violators, shaming inappropriate behavior, intervening when we witness sexual harassment or assault, and talking with other men about the things they can do to avoid being a violator, or how to thwart violators – are all necessary things. But, they aren’t exactly solutions to the systemic problem. In fact, focusing on punishment, on punitive actions, and things that might best be described as “late-stage actions” will inevitably lead to the criminalization of, well, puberty, which is already beginning to show in the current misapplication of the sex offender registries.

Take a listen to Episode 4, of Jon Ronson’s Butterfly Effect podcast where he talks to a lawyer who specializes in defending children (!) who have been put on the sex offender registry. One child the lawyer mentioned committed his “offense” at the age of six and was in the juvenile detention system until the age of 17. He then had to register as a sex offender once he was released – all because he was hanging out with a few older kids who decided to play a game where they would turn off the lights, take of their clothes, put them back on, then turn on the lights to see if they’d dressed themselves properly. The boy’s crime was that he didn’t put his clothes back on. A girl in the group who’d participated in the game, saw him naked and reported it to her mom who went to the police. By that standard, if I’d pulled my “I’m a robot” stunt today, I’d be on the sex offender registry. Thankfully, in the 70’s, parents weren’t so fragile and panicky, and they just called my mom to tell her what I’d done and trusted her to handle me (she did). Another child the lawyer mentioned was 14, and he took a dick-pic and sent it to a 14 year old classmate he was “dating.” That boy was convicted of possessing and distributing child pornography (as the owner and distributor of his own naked image), and put on the sex offender registry. What I also found interesting about the stories Ronson and the lawyer discussed were the judges who handled down these sentences. They often based their harsh sentences on the faulty notion that if they didn’t punish these early acts of “sexual misconduct,” the child would grow up to be a serial sex offender. Also, it’s not just boys being put on the sex offender registry. There are also a number of teen girls on the sex offender registry for sending nude selfies to their boyfriends and getting convicted of possessing and distributing “child pornography.” One girl mentioned in the New Yorker piece I link to is on the registry for de–pantsing a boy on the playground, which should have all of us who are over a certain age thinking about all the people we went to school with who could be on the registry for that.

It’s almost as if we are treating these young boys (and sometimes girls) the way we want to treat adult men when they do aggressive things tinted with sex, but if these boy can get to adulthood without flashing their junk at the wrong time, we then ignore such behavior until we can’t. In effect our patriarchal system is protecting adult men by shifting the punishment to young boys under the guise of prevention. And punishing children in the legal system for behavior that we lightly punish, or don’t punish, adults for doing is attacking a symptom, and not preventing anything.

Stopping sexual harassment and sexual assault is very important, and strongly sentencing people who commit sexual offenses is necessary, but the cases the lawyer mentions in The Butterfly Effect don’t really have the same feel as, say, a district attorney repeatedly coming on to teenaged girls in a mall, do they? Stripping naked in mixed company, sending unwanted dick-pics, or de-pantsing someone could certainly fall under the sexual harassment umbrella, especially if performed by adults, but shouldn’t also degree and frequency play a factor? I know that sounds like I’m staging a defense of certain categories of sexual harassment (like cat calls are OK, or flashing is rude but harmless (they’re not)), and if I were talking about behavior that is exclusive to adults then some kind of punishment – even if just widely spread social shame or even police citations like those handed out for jaywalking, or failing to signal a turn, or speeding – might be appropriate, but do all inappropriate acts involving inappropriate sexual advances, nudity, or the suggestion of sexual activity need to land people (especially kids) on a sex offender registry? We’re taking a huge risk if we fully criminalize behavior that, although unsettling, inappropriate, misguided, and offensive – especially when a man has personal or profession power over a woman – isn’t exactlya crime worthy of a prison sentences and life-long banishment to a sex offender registry, if we don’t also address the source – the root cause – of the behavior.

We need to remember that although men represent the majority of harassers, and women the majority of victims, there are male victims and female perpetrators. As Dan Savage frequently says, sex is older and more powerful than we are. It will, inevitably, make fools of us all at one point or another, and even though sexual harassment and sexual assault are about power, sex plays a part in those things. Shall we punish equally all foolish behavior that has sexual overtones? Or shall we scale punishment based on frequency and degree while also attempting to address the root social cause such as the way we raise boys to think of sex as a measure of their manhood and a competition?

We’re in this problem because of society’s warped puritanical, and patriarchal views regarding sex. In our society, women and girls are denied their own sexual agency, but expected to be responsible for keeping boy’s sexual desires in check. They’re told they have to preserve their “sexual purity” and the purity of the boys, all while these girl’s are being hyper sexualized by the media (notice the recent and justified outrage by people over the inappropriate labelling of Millie Bobby Brown as “sexy” when she is only 13 years old), and in the case of child beauty pageants, by their own parents. It’s confusing as hell for women and girls: their job is to be sexy but not appear to like sex, at least not too much, and certainly not to instigate it lest they be called a whore. But not only is that message confusing to women and girls, it’s confusing to men and especially boys who have not completely figured out the list of things not to do. We’ve made men emotional cripples and then told them they’re slaves to their dicks, which can only be kept in check if a girl dresses and behaves correctly and doesn’t distract them. In that environment, a hyper sexualized world and a boy who is amputated from his empathy, emotionally crippled, and absolved of responsibility for his sexual desires, anything a girl does can then become an invitation (see known-known #5 about the RAINN stats).

That dynamic is a perfect example of patriarchal male privilege and that’s the root cause we need to address.

Doctors don’t cure a disease by treating the symptoms. The virus, the cancer, the microbe that causes the symptoms has to be attacked. Sure, treating the symptoms is necessary to give the doctor the time and space to deliver the ultimate cure, but treating the symptoms is pointless if the a cure isn’t delivered at all. If all we do is tighten and strengthen the laws to punish repeated sexual harassment and sexual assault, and direct them most severely at boys in puberty and younger while still giving men like Brock Turner a weak slap on the wrist (6 months? really?), we are not only failing to truly change men’s behavior, we’re failing women because harassment, assault, and rape will still happen.

I suppose by now you can tell my answer is to smash the patriarchy, right? But how? This isn’t something just for Feminists to do. Men have to be the prime movers on this because that is the only way to break down the brotherhood of silence that surrounds men.

I’ve heard some lament the lack of some kind of honor code among men, an accountability system revived from the past. That kind of retrograde approach is so off-base I’m not sure where to start to rebuke it, except to point back to the section above on the war system. “Honor” such as it is, has never vanished or dissipated. Every man who is not guilty of sexual harassment or sexual assault has acted with honor and has done so because he has empathy, and not because he fears social pressure from other bros, or that he’ll violate some code of honor. Looking to the herd – especially for men – is a mistake because what has happened to get us here is a result of the herd policing and enforcing an honor code it no longer talks about and assumes everyone just knows. We’re can’t return to that or it’ll mutate again. “Honor” however it was defined in the past, is part of the arbitrary infrastructure of patriarchy, which makes it as much about posture and appearance as it is performance, or a trait to embody. It’s too vague of a term and too prone to misinterpretation in our current patriarchal war system.

There have also been suggestions that we have to expose boys to “non-sexual touch,” that if only it were OK for boys to hug each other or hold hands, and if we don’t always think a cross gender hug is a prelude to sex, then boys will begin to read signs better. Again, this is a symptom thing, and not as general as it might seem. In India, and several Arab countries, it’s common for straight men to show affection for each other by holding hands, and yet, right now, India is struggling with a gang rape problem and rampant sexual assault and victim silencing. So, how a culture views non-sexual touching, or how it sexualizes touching that shouldn’t be sexualized, or gendered, isn’t really the problem.

The problem with sexual assault and sexual harassment is our patriarchal system, and if we really want to put a stop to sexual harassment and sexual assault – to squash our rape culture – we have to get rid of the patriarchal capitalist war system. We can gnash our teeth and ponder punishments for the various symptoms we see around us, but until we stop raising boys to be empathetically and emotionally crippled, until we stop training them to be aggressive competitors and combatants, until we stop raising them to measure their masculinity and worth by their economic power, and their sexual conquests, then there are going to be boys and men who will treat women like commodities to be acquired rather than human beings with whom to have a meaningful consensual relationship.

So, where to start? Sadly, I don’t have a step-by-step, uniform guide, or easy prescription for being a better man. Keen didn’t have one either, he had what he called a “Primer for Now and Future Heroes,” which was basically an adaptation of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” It was a method, a broad set of moves he thought men should make. For example here are some of the section headings: “From Sunny Pragmatism to the Dark Wisdom of Dream Time” or “From Having the Answers to Living the Questions” or “From Artificial Toughness to Virile Fear” and “From Isolation to the Awareness of Loneliness.” Basically, it means we all have to go on a personal, internal quest first, and there’s no map for that, really. Like Keen, I feel a closeness to the work of Joseph Campbell, and not just the new age-y sounding popular nugget “follow your bliss” but the deeper mythological foundations that can, still, help us understand ourselves if we, as men, gain the emotional intelligence to read and understand them. Campbell was fond of pointing out that in the Arthurian legends, when the Knights of the Round table decided they would set out in search of the Holy Grail, they didn’t march off in a uniform line along a known or marked path. Each knight entered the dark wood at a place of his own choosing. They quested alone, for the most part, but gave aid when their paths crossed. So, find your path, men. It might not be a bad idea to read some books first, and search your inner self.

I suppose I do have one hard and fast rule you can start following today: shutting the fuck up when the women in your life complain about men is a good first step in reactivating your empathy as a man: listen, don’t react, and stop taking their general comments about men personally. When needed, apologize for the things you’ve done wrong, make amends, but do not, I repeat, DO NOT ever trot out the “not all men” argument. If a woman is complaining to you about “men” you should realize that she already sees you as an exception, or as close to an exception as she’ll find. If you roll out with the phrase “not all men do, say, or think that..” then you are, in fact, all men. Honor that trust, and then, piece by piece, habit by habit, begin to dismantle the patriarchy around you and step outside of it as a human.

Then, once you’ve got that handle on yourself, and some well developed ideas to talk about, maybe you could start a conversation with your son, if you have one, and pay attention to the ways you might be stifling his empathy and emotional expression. Start a conversation with your father, if he’s still alive, ask what he feared would happen if he didn’t stifle your empathy and emotional expression (be patient if he’s defensive). Start a conversation with your male best friend (if you have one) about the expectations you feel burdened by. Relax, actually, and stop trying to enforce a code onto yourself and other men that is any more complicated or rigid than the classic Golden Rule (you know the one, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And don’t be snarky about it – i.e. “but I’d love it if a girl grabbed my junk” because you’d recoil if it was a woman you didn’t want to grab your junk and remember, not every woman likes you). It’s going to take some time. Dual inheritance theory would suggest that we have a messy web of stuff to untangle that includes both deeply ingrained social constructs and even more deeply ingrained instinctual, genetic drives we will need to weed out and counteract.

So, if we really want to see change – permanent change – to the way men treat women, then men have to not just talk about changing their behavior or views of women, they have to want to abandon patriarchy as a system. Both men and women have to find a way to value those traits that patriarchy currently devalues (empathy, emotional awareness) and undercut the fear that embracing them is a sign of weakness or a loss of our manhood and begin to see them as sources of strength and power. When someone is in touch with the wider range of human emotions, when they can imagine and recognize the humanity in others, they’ll be less likely to abuse and mistreat those around them.

Bibliography & Other Source MaterialBooks:Fire In The Belly: On Being a Man by Sam KeenWhat Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel BergnerSex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda JethaStiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan FaludiMisogyny: The Male Malady by David D. GilmoreThe Decline of Males by Lionel TigerThe Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private by Susan BordoSex & Reason by Richard A. PosnerSex In History by Reay TannahillMy Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives by Judith LevineSexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille PagliaManhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis by Mels Van DrielFemale Perversions by Louise KaplanA Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David M. FriedmanThe Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine MilletBitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth WurtzelAs Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John ColapintoThe War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men by Christina Hoff SommersWe Were Soldiers Once. . . And Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. GallowayWhat Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future Edited by Rebecca WalkerRomance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth by Joseph CampbellThe Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
**The Murderer Next Door: Why The Mind is Designed to Kill by David M. Buss
**On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

(** These books are problematic in one way or another: good information but either abused in practice by the author (Grossman) or plagued by faulty conclusions (Buss). Read with a hyper critical eye.)

There is something rotten in modern American manhood, especially straight, white American manhood.

That might be too obvious of an understatement, but let’s run with it.

A friend, who is a single mother, occasionally shares things on social media about some of the awkward and horrible moments from her online dating life, as well as other shockingly offensive moments of sexism and misogyny that she encounters simply by being a woman online. I think of it as a public service for women — a kind of field guide to douchey behavior — but it’s also a service for men (that is, of course, if men are willing to shut up and listen), about the prevalence of toxic masculinity online and in real life.

I think the kind of public sharing this friend is doing (as well as a few other women I know) is one of the more interesting and personal social experiments going on right now. In the ever-fraught tension between women and men, Feminism and Patriarchy, such public shaming of badly behaving men seems daring and, also, a bit dangerous (if you want to read a litany of horror stories about shitty men — everything from murder to pettiness — go read the Tumblr When Women Refuse), but ultimately valuable.

Before the internet, when women had horrible encounters with shitty men that fell short of sexual assault or rape, their face-to-face talks with other women were, more or less, private and rarely got far beyond their immediate circle of friends. Men were often not involved in those discussions, unless they happened to be gay, or otherwise deemed safe, and so the bad behavior by men often went unchallenged. It also probably appeared less pervasive since there was rarely the influx of “me too” posts from women not normally in the same social circles, nor the odd defensive tip-ins from male trolls. Social media is giving women a platform to air their grievances about men in a much more public and democratic way, and to inflict some justified public shame onto those men who think women only exist in the world to service men’s sexual appetites and prop up their fragile egos.

Of course, this public act of calling out men for their boorish behavior online invites backlashes
of every kind — ranging from angry and vindictive threats of physical harm (including threats of rape and murder) to plain old mean comments about a woman’s looks, and from benevolently sexist pledges to defend a woman’s honor to the whiny and defensive “not all men” vein of comments.

The internet is a fiercely toxic place for women, and that is entirely the fault of men.

I wanted to get that out there early.

The second thing I want to get out before I get to the meat of why I don’t want to be called a Feminist is this: to one degree or another, I have been guilty of several minor sins and transgressions that this friend, and other women, have experienced; sullen, not-all-men whininess and defensiveness, certain benevolent sexisms, and a sense of self-important entitlement to a woman’ attention, etc.. Basically, when I was younger, I was one of those pathetic chumps who thought, I’m a nice guy, why doesn’t she want to be with me? I like to think I’ve been listening and learning over the last forty-five years and, even though I’m by no means perfect, I am trying to excise those unexamined, ingrained Patriarchal reactions that come with being a straight white man in America. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes, even at forty-six, I fail, but I hope that by admitting to my own sins before continuing no one will think I’m engaged in an extended version of the “not all men” whine, or a boys-will-be-boys argument, nor that I’m mounting some holier-than-thou lecture, and, finally, so no one thinks I’m claiming to be that current manifestation of entitled male chicanery — the Male Feminist Champion.

In fact, I hope to find a different label for men who are anti-Patriarchal, but that’s not really why I’m writing this.

So, back to my thing here . . .

I originally sat down to collect my thoughts on and around my friend sharing some of her online dating experiences, and some other emotionally abusive personal interactions she’s had to endure. I had hoped to write about the things I’d learned by observing the interactions between men and women on her posts, and so on. I hadn’t planned on, nor am I going to tell her story, nor try to explain it in detail here, but one of the things my friend brings to light is the presence of men in the literary world who seem to champion women writers . . . as long as these men then get something in return, especially sex. Then when these men don’t get what they want for supposedly boosting a woman writer’s career, they get angry, abusive, and aggressive in an attempt to undermine the woman’s career, punish her personally, or frighten her into silence.

Often, these men have, in the past, presented themselves, or were presented by others, as champions or allies of women writers — even as Feminists (usually with little or no proof). Then something happens and their entitled, sexist world view spills out. This dynamic is present in a lot of creative areas, not just literary: it’s there in the art world, and in theatre and in cinema. It’s even present in the corporate world, I’m sure. It is the most toxic version of Benevolent Sexism, which is a form of sexism that appears to support the notion that women can do whatever they want, but that they need men’s protection and help to be able to do it. Benevolent sexism is offensive all on its own, and demeaning to women, but it turns truly toxic when the men who practice it expect some form of sexual payment in return for their supposedly “benevolent protection” or support of women, which is, of course, conditional on these men getting what they want.

Another version of this is when men develop actual, valid, public reputations as good-guy male Feminist champions and then passively — without coercion, threats, promises, or expectations of reward for their pro-woman actions, take advantage of women. This seems to be the dynamic that was revealed about Joss Whedon in the very public open letter by his ex-wife, Kai Cole. And it’s the thing that made this essay shift its tack from something short about a few snappy comebacks to sexist men, to trying to think-out-loud about the seemingly inevitable self-destruction of “male feminists.”

Kai Cole’s open letter about her ex-husband basically tore down his image as a good-guy male Feminist champion. A lot of people were, and, I assume, still are, upset about both the letter, and also Whedon’s alleged behavior (a Whedon spokesperson says the letter contains “inaccuracies”). Either way, the seemingly unassailable icon of good-guy male Feminism turned out to be just another womanizer unable to keep his dick in his pants, and unable to refrain from cheating on and deceiving, his wife.

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds around the beliefs I’ve come to hold regarding sex and marriage vis-a-vis monogamy, and how monogamy is hard and not ideal for everyone. That’s another post altogether (listen to Dan Savage’s “Savage Lovecast” if you want the source material for my ideas), but it goes something like this: monogamy is hard and not for everyone, and just because you got married doesn’t mean you stop being sexually attracted to other people, and it doesn’t mean you give up your opposite sex friends. Monogamy simply means you refrain from fucking people other than your spouse, and that can sometimes be hard to do, so don’t destroy the marriage just because there’s ONE slip up. However, if you like sexual variety and you can’t give that up even though you’re married, then let’s hope you’ve chosen a partner who also likes sexual variety so that you and your partner can negotiate, and mutually enter into, an open relationship. But, open relationships are just as hard as monogamous ones because open relationships require just as much, if not more, trust and communication. If you want an open relationship and your partner doesn’t, you should have figured that out before you got married, and if you can’t keep to monogamy then get divorced before you ruin each other. Deception is the sin, the transgression, and the wrong perpetrated, not necessarily the sex itself.

In other words, if Joss and Kai had negotiated a mutually acceptable open relationship, and Kai had been able to pursue sexual relationships outside of the marriage as well, then we’d have nothing to talk about here. Joss’s infidelity is an issue specifically because Kai believed she was in a monogamous relationship, and Joss let her believe she was in a monogamous relationship while he, demonstrably, was not in a monogamous relationship.

So, to be clear before I go any further: my intention in the rest of this post isn’t to defend Joss Whedon. It appears that he violated the marriage as it was understood by Kai, and as the both of them then presented it to the public, and he deserves to be called out for his infidelity and punished appropriately (divorce, etc.). But to get at what fascinates me about the rise and inevitable downfall of the male Feminist hero in general, and why I am back to not wanting to be called a Feminist, I will have to explain how I think Whedon ended up the way he did, and to do so, it may appear to a casual reader as if it’s a defense of his actions, when it’s not.

So, let us proceed. There will be many more cul-de-sacs.

There have been plenty of people offering up their takes on the Whedon issue. For a while it was hot news for Whedon fans, and it was, and possibly still is, sadly, an appealing distraction from the socio-political train wreck coming out of Washington DC and America in general, even though it plays well into the bigger social concerns about toxic masculinity and its effect on, well, the world. I’m sure essays like this one have been bouncing around the internet on blogs and click-bait sites, but, I’m not really interested in getting into the social media hot-take post-mortem dissection and screed fest that is specifically about Whedon’s shattered street-cred as a male Feminist ally. I’m more interested in the mechanics of this situation, and how it works for all men who have been acknowledged as “Male Feminist allies” and who have then taken a fall for one Patriarchal transgression or another.

This post from the writer John Scalzi, which was in response to the media flurry after Cole’s letter, caught my attention. In it, he sought to clarify a few things with regard to his own Feminist label, and one of the things that stood out for me was the idea of “passive Feminism,” which is, basically, a man’s ability to step back from the Feminist fight for equality without being thought to have given up his fundamental belief that women should be treated equally.

Women who take up Feminist causes (and even those who think they haven’t) are in that battle all the time by virtue of being women in this society. Patriarchy, in response to Feminism, has made everything a woman does somehow weighted or conflicted — or both. Is the straight married woman who becomes a stay-at-home mom giving in to traditional gender roles (was she forced into it by a traditionalist husband?), or did she and her husband make a rational, practical decision where both parents were equal candidates for the stay-at-home parent role? Why do some high profile conservative women in the media and in politics, who are obviously benefiting from Feminist advances, and who have gained access to the levers of social and political power, seem to support causes that would undermine their very ability to do what they’re doing? — and so on. Should women dress how they like, or dress to be taken seriously by men when, in truth, some men will criticize women no matter what they wear, and that very duality means women have to be prepared to defend their choices (if not themselves), which is something men never really have to do.

If a woman makes a choice that doesn’t seem to jive with, or can’t be rationally defended as, a “Feminist choice,” then, well, judgement from the peanut gallery will be handed down. That kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t criticism is mind-bendingly paralyzing. And it’s something men who support Feminism don’t have to deal with. Passive Feminism, being a uniquely male privilege, means a husband can make a decision about the time he spends with his kids, or time he spends at work, and not have it be counted for or against his Feminist belief that women should be paid equally, or that women should be free from the fear of rape.

That all got me thinking (again) about the role of men in the fight for gender equality, and about the problematic condition of being a man in a deeply ingrained Patriarchal system who is in favor of smashing that very Patriarchy, and who calls himself a Feminist. To me, calling myself a Feminist presents a barrier when trying to reach the men around me who are struggling to live up to the Patriarchal demands of traditional manhood (which includes a fear of being seen, in any imaginable way, as “feminine”). But what other label works?

Scalzi describes a similar arc to his feelings about applying the term Feminist to himself that I have gone through. I discussed my own no-yes-no flip-flop in a previous post on this blog (see here). But to sum up: I believe women should be treated equally, but, in the beginning, I didn’t want to call myself a Feminist (in fact, I didn’t believe a man could call himself a Feminist since he wasn’t a woman). After a while, however, I got tired of trying to skim that delicate linguistic line between believing the tenets of a thing, but not calling myself by its name and said, fine, I’m a Feminist. Then, of course, the douche canoes came along, calling themselves Feminists, but actually using the label to leverage themselves into abusive power relationships with women, and now, again, I’m reluctant to call myself a Feminist if only to avoid the suspicious are-you-really-a-Feminist side-eye I get when I say I’m a Feminist.

I’d rather people judge me by my actions, rather than my label, because people will see the label first and expect a certain level of performance that I may not be able to live up to at all times. It’s a thin self-defense, but . . .

Cole’s open letter about Whedon, and Scalzi’s essay, strangely, have brought me right back to the desire to find a term men can rally under and which represents an actual movement that both sociologically and philosophically supports Feminism, and complements it. At the same time it would help to advance “gender equality” by getting men to focus on changing men. We should have a “men’s movement” that supports Feminism, understands it deeply, but focuses on the process of men changing other men’s perceptions, rules, expectations, and definitions of masculinity in a positive way and from within the framework of “manhood.” Something like that would help undercut the pervasive, damaging effects of Patriarchy on men.

So, first off, I don’t think men should become standard bearers for Feminism. Let’s stop attempting to attain or assign the label of “male feminist” whatever (icon/champion/hero) to men. When men get involved in Feminist organizations, they should stick to support roles. In other words, they should bring donuts, sit in the back, shut up, and listen without getting defensive. Men then need to go off on their own and think about and alter their views, thoughts, and behaviors among other men. Then, when men do speak out, it should be about what men can and should do to change in parallel to women, and not about what they can do to protect or defend Feminist positions, which women are doing a fine job of protecting and defending themselves. If we listen to women’s stories about their personal and professional lives, we’d know that, as a society, we still encounter moments, even in the most enlightened spheres, where people will sometimes defer to the seemingly most confident white male in the room as the leader even when a more qualified and experienced woman is there.

It’s a sign of Patriarchy’s prevalence in our mental architecture that men get labeled as “Feminist champions” in the way Whedon did — it’s not that it can’t be true that a man is a champion of Feminism – but it is a manifestation of a fundamentally Patriarchal system to elevate a man to that status. There are wise men out there who lend their privilege to the act of elevating women’s voices, and that’s a good thing, but we always seem to end up praising and valuing the man’s act of speaking over the message itself, thus elevating the male act of Feminist support over the Feminist message.

It happens quite regularly: a privileged white man chooses to elevate or amplify a Feminist voice, but then people react to the man speaking and not the woman’s message the man is attempting to amplify. Patrick Stewart was featured in a meme that kind of subtly gets at this.

Here’s Stewart under a quote he supposedly made, bearing a placard calling for the defense of women’s and girls’ rights. This image, when it first appeared, made the rounds in my social media circles. But what came of it except an elevation in Stewart’s popularity? Did male involvement in N.O.W., or Planned Parenthood increase? Did donations to Amnesty International increase? I’m sure Stewart himself has continued to donate to and support the cause (he seems to be an honorable man), but how drastic has the drop in support been among his admirers since the initial appearance of this meme? What is going on now with Amnesty International’s fight to protect the rights of girls and women (I bet a woman could tell you) (here’s Amnesty International’s page on Gender, Sexuality, & Identify, too).

Now, to make the case with a personal example, here’s a brief story about something that happened to me after the 2016 election. It’s the not-so-positive version of the male voice being seen as more important than the message.

I take my cues on Feminism primarily from minority Feminists because I believe that if we elevate women of color to the point where those women have the same rights, access, and privileges as someone like me — a cis gendered straight white male — then we, as a society, no longer have a reason to discriminate against people because of their gender or race. I vote with and stand with black women because doing so, to me, is the antithesis of white male self interest.

So, in the spate of hot-take analyses after the 2016 Democratic failure, I shared an opinion piece on Facebook that was written by a black feminist. I shared it without adding any comments of my own because there was nothing I had to say that hadn’t already been said by the author. The essay (which I can no longer locate, dammit) was critical of white Feminists who failed to support Hillary Clinton and who, instead, voted for one of the third-party candidates, or worse, Trump. I was promptly scolded by a white Feminist who said that I – as a strong Feminist ally — should know better than to share such a critical article because by doing so I was actually reinforcing the Patriarchy.

I was baffled, and in a way, I suppose I still am. I had chosen to amplify a black Feminist voice — yes, it was one that felt betrayed by her white feminist sisters — but instead of hearing the message, what this person saw was a man criticizing women. The actual message in the essay was, however slightly, clouded by my white male presence.

Aside from gender, the other tines in the fork of Patriarchy are race, wealth, and sexual identity. Again, I wish I could find the article because the author made, I thought, excellent and specific points about how the black women who’d supported Hillary Clinton throughout her political career felt betrayed by middle and upper class white Feminists who chose to ignore Trump’s threat to the social and economic programs that poor women, especially poor women of color, rely on, because, as white women, the loss of access to healthcare, childcare, job training, food stamps, and so on wouldn’t really affect those white ladies at all.

I shared the article because, as a white man, in a mostly white society, I have very little contact with women of color. If I don’t seek out their voices, I won’t hear them. Consequently, I know a lot of white women on Facebook, and I can see their friends lists, and I know they also lack access to a wide range of minority women’s voices. So, I shared the article, probably subconsciously expecting my white maleness to blur the message in some way, but still hoping it might wake up a few people to the way white privilege operates. I just didn’t expect the criticism to come from the person it came from.

The irony of not being able to find that article right now.

Moving on.

Patriarchy, after all, is a tiered system: rich, straight, white men on top, and non-white poor, gay and trans women at the bottom. For whites, especially those who aren’t straight white males, their whiteness is a veil they can sometimes hide behind. Via the poisonous gift of racism, white women can, and often have, ignored women’s issues that are complicated by, or intersect with, race and poverty, such as access to job training, affordable childcare, reproductive healthcare, and even affordable, healthy food. That white veil has been common to Feminism from the beginning. Read the Combahee River Collective Statement, read bell hooks (I need to do more of this myself, I’ve not read bell hooks since the Philosophy of Feminism class I took as an undergrad 2o+ years ago). Feminist women of color can all tell you stories about the racial and economic tone-deafness of privileged white Feminists better than I can since they have first hand, personal experience.

But that’s another story for another post.

The Patriarchal system, with its undertones of racism and classism, surrounds us as if we were fish in water and, strangely, it is something I’ve often thought clouded some of the Feminist writing that I have read over the years, as well as most of the in-person discussions I’ve had with Feminist women and pro-Feminist men. The most obvious example of this problem is the tendency, still, to assign a gender to emotions and emotional intelligence in such a way that it reinforces this myth that women are naturally complex and adept emotional Swiss Army knives, while men are emotionally incapable of being more than blunt, rusted butter knives. Yes, there are some cognitive and emotional differences between men, but the fact is this: a Patriarchal system is built to steal emotional complexity from men — just as it steals the privilege to be assertive and angry from women. In other words, Patriarchy demands that women and men each be only half of a human being.

Now, Feminism is doing an outstanding job of reclaiming women’s human right to be assertive and angry, strong and powerful, but in truth, it’s not doing a very good job of helping men reclaim the half of their humanity that was stolen from them. Take a look at how prevalent and powerful the fear among men still is at being called “a girl,” a “sissy,” a “fag,” and so on. But, you know, it’s not Feminism’s job to reclaim those things FOR and on behalf of men. It simply tells men they need to change, and it should and does provide some broad suggestions about what that change should be (like stop raping women), but it is, ultimately, men’s responsibility to figure out how to change themselves in response to the changes in women.

I’m getting a bit off-track here, so let’s reset back to the issue of Passive Feminism, but keep that idea of men’s voices overriding and drowning out women’s voices even when men are pro-Feminist.

This privilege that men have to be passively Feminist – to both believe in the equality of women while being able to disengage for periods of time from the day-to-day engagement in the struggle — is a hinge point I’ve been missing in my thinking about why men shouldn’t call themselves Feminists, and how a man like Whedon and other “defrocked” male Feminist Icons have lost their way.

The advances made by Feminism have come from women pushing back, day-by-bay, against the limitations put on them by our Patriarchal system. In addition to advancing the radical idea that women are people, one of the central areas where women have resisted the Patriarchy the most, and which is fundamental to every other area of Feminism’s resistance and progressiveness, is to resist the crippling notion that women should be passive. The term “empowerment” is tossed around so much in media representations of Feminism that it sometimes loses its meaning and gets taken for granted (here’s an article from the satire site The Onion that makes light of this: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does). However, we forget, I think, that the basic idea of empowerment, is one of being an active agent in one’s life rather than a passive one. Being an active agent in one’s own life is something women still get criticized for doing, but it is the default expectation for men.

As a society, we value action over passiveness, and men are expected to take action and shun passiveness, but in truth there are times when passiveness is valuable, even wise. Women haven’t forgotten this, even as they’ve been embracing, fiercely “empowerment.” The problem is incentivizing the acquisition of passiveness, which is the trait that allows a person to step back, give room for others to speak and be recognized. It is the foundation of being a good listener. Men need to learn this trait, but it’s a challenge because of Patriarchy’s strict list of rules about what a “man” cannot be. For men, the kind of passivity needed to be fully human isn’t the passivity of apathy, but of empathy, and that is, in the masculine world, a sign of weakness, and weakness must be avoided, denied, and, when it shows up in a man, excised like cancer. Getting a man who is deathly afraid of being seen as weak to embrace something he sees as a weakness is as difficult as getting a child who’s afraid of clowns anywhere near a clown.

But finding a way to frame those emotions denied men, but allowed women, and which the Patriarchy deems less valuable is exactly the endeavor we, as men, have to undertake. That, I think answers a question I’ve been pondering for years and which I first encountered when reading the end of the Combahee River Collective Statement. At the end of that manifesto, they quote Robin Morgan from her book Sisterhood is Powerful:

I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.

It’s not a woman’s job or responsibility to find that revolutionary role for men. That role, I’ve come to believe, is certainly not to be found within the ranks of Feminism. Every man who dons the mantel of Feminist (like Joss Whedon) runs the risk, whether they are famous or not, of putting themselves in a position to silence a woman’s voice, and to obfuscate their agenda whether that’s their intention or not. If men are going to fight the Patriarchal system, we have to be aware of — at all times — especially as men who believe in the fundamental tenets of Feminism – how deeply insidious and pervasive, both linguistically and socially, the Patriarchy is within our own minds, and how easy it is for us, by our mere presence in a room, to shift the focus of the discussion, and avoid our own inner conflicts.

When men have assumed the mantle, either voluntarily or involuntarily, of being a “Male Feminist” they have inevitably failed because the Patriarchal system within their own heads has gone unexamined. Their Passive Feminism takes over and their own privilege goes unchecked, or becomes mutated. In other words, men, by signing on to the Feminist cause as a “Feminist,” can find it easy to focus on making space for women while at the same time not really examining their own internal, ingrained, habitual ideas about manhood, masculinity, and the societal privilege and prestige that comes with being a man. Throw in some praise from women about being “a strong supporter or ally of feminism,” then mix that with some common human insecurities and obsessions, and that man is ripe to fuck up and become exactly the kind of man Feminists are leery of.

We live in a lonely world, and despite the lame stereotypical cliches, Feminists are not man-hating lesbians. They want men to be something other than chauvinistic, sexist, violent, and entitled. That’s a requirement for ending sexism and America’s rape culture. So, when a supposedly good-guy male Feminist ally comes along there will be, naturally, women who will show an intimate interest in him. He appears to be, after all, someone who won’t abuse them, stifle them, or feel entitled to their bodies when they don’t want to share their bodies with him, etc.

But sex, as Dan Savage says, is older than we are and more powerful. It will win out, which means that if a good guy Feminist ally shows up, then there will be at least one Feminist woman who will be sexually attracted to him, and that DOES NOT, make her “needy.” So, because sex is older and more powerful than we are, that’s why monogamy is hard, and why open relationship demand regularly maintained lines of communication. Sex will also use whatever social, mental, instinctual, and emotional tools available to get what it wants — even among us lowly plebes who aren’t Hollywood producers, which, now, finally, brings us all the way back to Joss Whedon.

So, give a good-guy male Feminist even a semblance of power over someone’s career-like a film and TV producer — and we have the makings of a tragedy. That very dynamic is clearly evident, according to Kai Cole’s quotes from her ex-husband’s letters where he attempted to explain his infidelity. According to Cole, Whedon stated that, as a respected and powerful producer, he found himself suddenly surrounded by “beautiful, needy, aggressive young women.” I would certainly question Whedon’s use of the word needy; however, remember, Patriarchy is insidiously ingrained in the psyches of both men AND women. In a classic Patriarchal system, women can gain favor and protection by granting sexual access (if you haven’t, you should read Sex At Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha to get a good solid grasp on the function of sex in social primates — or humans — if you will), and the men who are granted sexual access then feel they are entitled to it.

A patriarchal society fetishizes male power, grants emotional and sometimes financial rewards for the exercise of it so, my guess, is that the women Whedon had affairs with weren’t “needy,” — (beautiful, aggressive and young, yes, but not “needy”) and they were simply seduced by a combination of his reputation and power, and blinded by a lack of awareness regarding the underlying truth driving their attractions that is the ingrained Patriarchal system inside our own minds. They were simply obeying a subsumed and unexamined set of rules about the application and exchange of male and female power — as was Whedon. It takes two to tango, as the cliche goes (here’s where it might start to sound like a defense), and since no one has claimed to have been sexually assaulted or raped by Whedon (at least as far as I can tell with a quick Google search), then those affairs, although dishonest, must have been tolerably consensual.

And, as I mentioned earlier, dishonesty is the real sin, not necessarily the sex. And Whedon was being dishonest with the women he had affairs with, and, more importantly, he was being dishonest with his wife. At least that is something he seems to have (thankfully) admitted to in the quotes Cole provided in her letter.

For Whedon’s part, the kind of attention he got from women after Buffy became popular was probably something that had rarely happened to him before, and he took advantage of that to satisfy some latent, unexamined desires that were then supported by the fundamental entitlement that comes with maleness in a Patriarchal system. I doubt the real reasons are that tidy, and I don’t know a thing about Whedon’s life as a young man before he became a successful writer, director, and producer, but I am going to speculate about what happened based on my own experience as a formerly shy, nerdy, boy who had a lot of female friends and turned into a pro-feminist man.

From what Ms. Cole’s letter suggests about Whedon leads me to believe that he was the kind of boy growing up who was aware of how badly women were (and are) treated in society, and he didn’t want to be seen as one of those “jerks.” In the era he and I grew up in (he’s only 7 years older than I am), benevolent sexism was common, and mostly unacknowledged, which often made it the posture men would assume if they were sympathetic to women’s unfairly diminished “situation” in society. The best way to help women, they would have thought (as I did when I was growing up in the 80s), would have been to adopt the traditional male posture of kindly protection (benevolent sexism). Sadly, what rides the coattails of benevolent sexism is the false and entitled belief that a man’s kindly protection of women should be rewarded by women. When that kindly protection isn’t rewarded, some men feel they are justified in getting angry, some withdraw — all, I think, become a little bitter (at least until they realize that benevolent sexism means that even though they’re being a kinder, gentler dick, they’re still being a dick).

So, when a man’s kindly protection of women is rewarded — even if it’s accidental — it feels like a fucking million dollar jackpot to a man enmeshed in Benevolent Sexism. What makes it worse is that, if a man hasn’t really considered the way that Patriarchy has set him up to believe he should be rewarded for behavior that was last useful when humans were NOT apex predators or members of vast city-states, he begins to think that sexual reward is something he should expect, or worse, something that he deserves. That’s the irony here: even though he grew up with a feminist mother, even though he probably didn’t want to be a Patriarchal jerk, and even though Whedon adopted Feminism, his unexamined privilege to engage in Passive Feminism and his core indoctrination in Patriarchy’s Benevolent Sexism came along for the ride. Then, into that liminal space between Active and Passive Feminism and his unexamined Patriarchal sexism, stepped our old nemesis, mutual sexual desire, temptation, and lust.

Here was a self-professed, male Feminist, encouraged by his wife to achieve the fame he’d wanted, and who got famous for writing a strong female character (Buffy), and who suddenly found himself surrounded by young, beautiful, ambitious, strong willed women enmeshed in a brutally competitive industry. To rejigger the famous line from Field of Dreams, build strong female characters and young, beautiful, aggressive, and ambitious actresses will come. Along with that will come Hollywood competition, and in a Patriarchal system, with sexual animals, our old, powerful nemesis will come out. I’m sure someone saw the train wreck coming, but then again, a Patriarchal system finds a way, at least in the past it did, to excuse male indiscretions — for a while at least.

Now, not all of us men who call ourselves, or get called “Feminist allies” are powerful Hollywood writers, directors, or producers, and yet we stand an equally good chance of committing the exact same sin as Whedon. There is a fundamental tension created between men and women when the unexamined, almost subconscious Patriarchal tendencies that are present in both genders come into contact with sexual desire and the higher brain functions where thought and reason happen.

In the book What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future, the editor, Rebecca Walker, writes “I also hope that women […] will reflect deeply on their part in maintaining the male charade. If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who ‘just so happens’ to be a good provider.”

Like all things between the genders, that sentiment, which is a call, in a way, to mindfully employ Sexual Selection and gene-culture co-evolution (dual inheritance theory), is both an invitation for positive change and a doorway for abuse. Remember, sex is older and more powerful than we are, but we are in possession (at least we tell ourselves we are) of choice and free will. So, yeah, if women say they want sensitive, thoughtful men who are in touch with their emotions, and who are pro-Feminist, then they should fuck men who are sensitive, thoughtful, in touch with the emotions, and pro-Feminists.

The problem is, Patriarchy tells men that, to be a real man they should be fucking a lot of women — and anything a man says to accomplish that is ok because, in the Patriarchal system, women who want sex are whores and women who say they don’t want sex actually, secretly want it, they just need to be convinced they want it. This is how you get guys calling themselves Feminists thinking it’ll help them get laid.

If a good guy male Feminist Champion hasn’t done his own internal work to undermine the Patriarchal wiring in his own head, things will probably get ugly quickly if he’s confronted with women who are in the process of “eroticizing a different type of man.” Things won’t get ugly because of the women, whether the women are vulnerable or defended doesn’t matter — it takes two to make a mistake after all (unless it’s rape and that’s the rapists fault 100%). Things will get ugly because the man slips unknowingly into a Patriarchal reward mode and begins to think this attention from Feminist women is a reward for his righteous “Feminist” action. It’s a complex version of “I bought you dinner; therefore, I deserve a blow job.” And, strangely enough, the reason that shitty belief among men persists is because, well, sometimes, sexual desire doesn’t give a damn about why we think something should happen. If a man thinks he deserves a blow job as payment for dinner, but doesn’t say it out loud, and the woman, ignorant of his expectation, gives him a blow job because she (for whatever reason) wanted to give this guy a blow job, then that guy has no reason to reconsider or change his shitty expectation because, somehow, he still got the blow job.

In my opinion, for a man to be able to call himself a Feminist, he has to be operating outside of, or in violation of, the Patriarchal system. And to do that, the man has to be as much of an outsider to the system as we can manage — even if only partially — which means he must be gay or transgendered. But here’s the thing about gay and transgendered men . . . they typically aren’t wrestling with whether to call themselves Feminists. The LBGTQ cause and the Feminist cause are, in a way, conjoined via every transgender woman and lesbian Feminist.

As a cisgendered straight white male who believes in the Feminist (and LGBTQ) cause, I can support and be an ally to those causes (donate money, time, etc.), but I shouldn’t be out in front of those causes acting as a voice or representative for those causes. Yes, it’s important that white cisgendered straight men be seen supporting Feminism and LGBTQ rights, but they should not be the tip of the spear, so to speak. First, I shouldn’t do it because I have the privilege to step away from those causes if they get too rough or challenging, which, really, makes me a fair weather champion, and second because, if my voice becomes too loud in those spheres it could — by virtue of the Patriarchal value system — become the focal point and override the message. That means that when I fail, stumble, act badly, I run the risk of damaging the cause in the eyes of those whom the cause is trying to convince to change. Also, it’s an excuse to leave undone the work of changing white cisgendered straight men from the inside.

Earlier, I mentioned that one of the important aspects of Feminism was altering the notion that women are passive agents in the world and moving them into being active, empowered agents. Men have always been seen as active, empowered agents, it’s the primary male virtue in a Patriarchal system. It’s here where the insidious nature of Patriarchy – and that tendency I’ve noticed among Feminists and pro-Feminist men alike to speak about fighting the Patriarchy without seeming to fully extricate their own language and perceptions from its very structure — makes itself seen.

The following statements should be so obvious that they don’t need to be written here, but I’m going to be pedantic and put them here anyway: In the tiered, hierarchical system of Patriarchy, especially American Patriarchy, it first splits human traits, virtues, and characteristics into separate camps: male and female. It then places the male traits, virtues, and characteristics above the female traits, virtues, and characteristics. When men and boys, women and girls, display traits not associated with their gender they are punished — sissies, fags, pansies, dykes, bitches, whores — and society attempts to force them back into the approved mold. Since Patriarchy places the “male” traits and characteristics on top of the hierarchy, they are, within that hierarchy, seen as more valued, just like the men who embody those traits. Female traits are then seen as less valuable, just like the women who embody them are less valued than men (but valued highly as property).

So, when women move to claim the human traits denied them, that desire — even when it is met with derision, threats, abuse, condescension, and rage — is something men kind of understand, even if only subconsciously. In a hierarchical system, it’s OK to want or desire the traits the system places the most value upon — especially if those traits are somehow denied to other segments of society. Yes, the patriarchal mind will acknowledge, of course women want to be strong, powerful and in charge like men, but they can’t be and so we have to stop women from trying. However, because those “masculine” traits are valued by society and confer privilege, women continue to push for them. So, even if a man resists the idea of women’s equality, and disrespects women in general, he still minimally “respects their fight” as it were, even as he condescends to it because, if there’s one thing a man understands, it is the desire to be powerful. Maybe that’s why they take such glee in their boorish behavior and power.

The other side of that is, since the female traits are seen as less than by the Patriarchal system, men don’t really have an incentive to adopt them (this is where Ms. Walker’s statement above can be reinserted to undermine the Patriarchal structure), especially when doing so invites criticism and disdain for being “weak.” If a man happens to have any of those feminine traits, they are shamed into hiding them. Even women who are pushing to be accepted in male spheres are encouraged to repress their “lesser” feminine traits. It’s a catch-22.

Among women, it’s an ideal to attain masculine style social and economic power while still retaining their feminine aspect. But there is no real equivalent for men because the cadre of people who value “soft” men is still mostly limited to women. So, except when we have these brief romances with men like Joss Whedon before they’re outed as, well, frauds, men only seem to make a change if there’s a reward. And since all reward systems can be abused, we get men who purposely use the “male feminist” label to deceive women about their separation from traditionally Patriarchal views in order to gain sexual access.

That, fundamentally, is one reason why I don’t want to call myself a Feminist, even though I fully support Feminism and Feminist goals. If I go around calling myself a Feminist, how long before I crowd out a legitimate Feminist voice, then, make it all worse and do or say something that contradicts my claim? I’m not perfect, and as a cisgendered straight white male, there really isn’t much room for me to make a mistake if I’m out front waiving the Feminist flag. Maybe if I don’t call myself a Feminist, I can retain some humanity, humility, and a tiny window for grace and forgiveness.

Patriarchy developed because, at one point, both genders saw some kind of value in the division of labor it presented. Unfortunately, it has outlived its usefulness and transmogrified into something vicious and toxic to both parties involved, and men haven’t spent the time really analyzing it from inside the masculine identity. That lack of internal effort opens men, even the ones who legitimately support Feminism, to the kind of split that allows them to publicly tout Feminism while privately acting in contradiction of its ideals.

Men who support Feminism need to be working among other men, in masculine spaces (locker rooms, construction sites, the office), to change the minds of men about what it means to be a man. This will be infinitely more useful to the cause of Feminism than men calling themselves Feminists and talking about Gloria Steinem and bell hooks. If you would like an example of the kind of work I’m talking about, watch the documentary The Mask You Live In.

That isn’t to say men shouldn’t be reading Steinem and hooks, or other Feminist writers and thinkers. They should be reading them. Those writers and thinkers should be foundational to whatever positive, anti-Patriarchal movement men establish out there if for no other reason than being a Patriarch in a Patriarchal system is like that proverbial fish that’s not aware of the water it’s swimming in. Embrace women’s voices, start to see the water, and then start trying to get yourself out of the water.

Whedon, and every other man who has worn the Feminist label and then failed to live up to it has done so because they never really got out of the Patriarchal system in their own minds.

Perhaps, especially for straight white men, the primary beneficiaries of the Patriarchal system, it’s a daunting, near impossible challenge to completely extricate ourselves from the system, but we, as men, still have to try to do that hard and challenging work on ourselves. Thankfully, hard work is something we’ve been told we’re good at: men surmount impossible things, right? We take on heroic fights against daunting odds, and so on. Calling ourselves Feminists and parroting Feminist talking points, is a short cut to a shallow enlightenment, which is why so many of the men who have made a name for themselves under the Feminist label have then gone on to shame themselves by not living up to the ideas. It’s easy to recite the rhetoric of Feminism, but it’s another thing entirely to live a life free of those crippling, toxic, Patriarchal habits of thought and action that lead men to demean, damage, and devalue women.

Lately, I’ve felt the need to revive an old argument, and trot out an updated version to see if it sticks this time. In the past, it never met with much success because I wasn’t quite sure how to overcome people’s tendencies to use personal experiences to attempt to negate a broader, more general truth.

That type of argument – the personal exception seen as proof against the truth of a broader, common generality – would, inevitably, be the derailing point when I would ague that, although men can and should support Feminism, they shouldn’t call themselves Feminists. The word, for men, is too culturally loaded and that, among men, especially the ones we need to most desperately reach, it puts up a barrier to the kind of discussions that could be beneficial to short-circuiting the Patriarchy and, actually, helping advance the idea of gender equality.

Usually, the discussion was diverted into the personal exception cul-de-sac by someone who would argue that her father or brother called himself a Feminist, or was “more of a Feminist than some women she knows,” or by a man, proud to call himself a Feminist. Both would argue that these feminist men were unafraid to admit they had a “feminine” side (I did say this was years ago), or were soft and gentle, and quickly followed that with wondering why I was so afraid admit those same things about myself and call myself a Feminist. Now, while it’s great that there are men comfortable with being called Feminists, and who can so freely admit to having nurtured the gentler human traits the Patriarchy would separate them from, that still leaves a few million men in the world who have been socialized and trained that to successfully navigate their masculinity they must begin by ruthlessly and sometimes violently negating the half of themselves that the Patriarchy has defined as “feminine,” “soft,” and “weak.”

I had such little success with my argument that I eventually gave up and, for a while at least, began to call myself a Feminist rather than try to debate the thin linguistic line I was try to draw so that I wouldn’t be seen as some kind of concern troll, or patriarchal apologist. Then, especially in the last couple of years, I began to notice a backlash against men who called themselves Feminists. There was the Salon article (all inks below) on the “Macktivist” – a man who calls himself a Feminist, and pretends to be an ally, but ends up being an abusive and manipulative sexist. There was the article from NY Mag’s “The Cut” that encouraged men to consider not calling themselves Feminists. There was the Guardian piece by a Feminist explaining why she will never date a Male Feminist. After those, and a number of other articles over the last few years asking if it was even possible for a man to be a Feminist, I began to rethink my argument that it’s not a good idea for men, even ardent, “good guy” supporters of Feminism, to call themselves Feminists now that it’s become an apparent tactic for narcissistic, psychopathic men to further abuse and manipulate women.

So, let me say for the benefit of any Feminists reading, I am an ardent supporter of Feminism. The goal of eradicating restrictive gender norms, and allowing all people to embrace the full spectrum of human capabilities as they wish, is one that I share. I am not suggesting that men stop supporting Feminist organizations or Feminist aligned organizations, or any other pro-woman’s rights and health endeavors. However, as a lot of the “How-to” pieces linked below suggest, men should not attempt to assume leadership roles in Feminist organizations where they might run the risk of telling women that they’re doing Feminism wrong (hell, we all know some men will do this anyway and never call themselves Feminists at all – it’s the perfect example of male self-entitlement to tell a woman she’s doing Feminism wrong while not knowing a damn thing about it). One of the reasons for Feminism is to break down the gender binary and make it acceptable, even passé, for women to be in public, economic, and political leadership roles that were once held only by men. That means the first thing men need to learn and accept is how to step aside, step back, and let go of the expectations of traditional manhood.

But, here’s the thing – if Feminism is about breaking down the Patriarchy and freeing us all from the diminished gender roles it enforces, then men especially need to find a way to fight the irrational anti-feminist suspicion a lot of men have that Feminism wants to turn them into women, or homosexuals. Yes, Feminism is good for women and also men, but putting down the Patriarchy can’t be done with the men who support it being seen by the frightened male opposition as weak, subversive followers (or to be blunt and politically incorrect, pansies, fags, wimps, pussies, bitches, etc.). To truly support Feminism, men have to help put down the Patriarchy from the “masculine” side too. Feminist men have to engage with those fearful, resistant men in a positive, productive manner. After all, women have helped prop up Patriarchy from the feminine side for generations by berating and brow beating other women into submission (think Phyllis Schlafly or even Ann Coulter); however, because those women were supporting the status quo they didn’t need a named banner to march under. Now, as I’ll address later, language is important, and in order to fight the ingrained linguistic divisions that are necessary for maintaining Patriarchal structures, I think we do need a banner for pro-feminist, anti-patriarchal men that gets those men past the reactionary patriarchal fear that a lot of men have about being seen as weak and effeminate.

Getting men to actually give up their power, prestige, and privilege is doomed to a slow, perpetually back-sliding affair if our best appeal is for them to “get in touch with their feminine or gentler side” or to profess that the patriarchy hurts them too, when, in fact, the Patriarchy also strongly rewards them for conforming. And the appeals to these men to consider how their sexist actions harm their mothers or sisters or daughters mostly ends up only fostering the prevalence of benevolent sexism (which is essentially a stance that women deserve all the same rights as men, but they need a man to protect them and their rights).

Those of us men who support Feminism know that to really get out from under the Patriarchy we have to confront sexist, patriarchal tendencies among our fellow men, and for a lot of us, those men we have to confront are the socially, politically, and even physically more dominant and violent among us. In a case of using the personal to support the general, I’ve been told that I don’t have to start with the violent meat heads yelling at women on the street, but that I should start with my male friends. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of male friends, and the ones I do have are already on board. When I encounter sexist men, they’re mostly strangers, and I have no idea what that man is capable of nor how violently he’ll react to me – and I’m not alone in that. The straight male world is built on dominance and intimidation. It’s also rife with a reactionary fear of being seen as un-manly, girly, gay, weak. Things that threaten a man’s illusion of power, of the fragile construct of straight manhood, are often met with anger and defensiveness, if not outright violence, in order to reestablish that sense of power and control. The Patriarchy shores up that fragility for a lot of men by rewarding their aggression, and so the damaging price they pay for their powerful, prestigious (but fragile) position in society is worth it even as it cripples them emotionally, kills them physically, and isolates them in their old age. A prime example of that is every young man who risks a lifetime of permanent bodily injury for a ten year career in the National Football league: the potential for the adulation, the money, and access to celebrity women, for some, far outweighs the risks presented by repeated concussions.

Men are in an interesting catch-22 when it comes to subverting the Patriarchy. The patriarchal system tells us we must be leaders, fighters, and dominators. We are supposed to take charge, get things done, solve problems, and not feel any of those soft, “feminine” emotions. And there are great rewards for doing that. But we also fear the humiliation and taunts that come from failing at those things, we fear being seen as weak among other men. For those men who are already seen as weak, or effeminate, there is the additional fear of physical violence at the hands of other, more aggressive men who need to assert their power and keep that negative lock on things they’ve been told not the think or feel. A lot of men come to support feminism because there are aspects to the Patriarchal demands of being a “man” that are uncomfortable and stressful, even unattainable, like the need to be seen as a leader, as strong, as a fighter, or a cocksman. We come to Feminism because we know that when it becomes more acceptable for women to be in powerful positions side-by-side with men, then the more acceptable it will become for men who recoil at the traditional masculine gender role to be who we are. But, ironically, in order to change other men’s perspective on issues of gender it requires a man to embrace those very same traits they’re often uncomfortable with and that they’re trying to subvert. To get past the barriers of fear and aggression other men will engage in to push away the threat of the so-called feminine, we have to first don the heavy armor of patriarchal manhood, display our bona-fides as real men, just to get through the defensive perimeter. It’s fighting fire with fire, and it has the same kind of bad logic as claiming to bring peace by waging war. It’s no coincidence that some of the men most successful at talking to other men about the dangers and risks of traditional, patriarchal male gender roles are former pro football players, former cops and soldiers, or former gang members, i.e. men who inhabited, at some point in their lives, an idealized, glorified embodiment of manhood. Changing that dynamic, changing the requirements among men about who has the authority to comment on manhood is one of things that could happen if men who support the dismantling of the Patriarchy had a banner to rally under instead of rallying under the Feminist banner, or behind the individual ex-football player, ex-cop, ex-solider, or ex-gang member. All journeys to manhood have to become valid, not just the ones through combat, either the ceremonial variety of sport, or the actual variety in war zones and drive-by shootings.

Patriarchy is insidious, pervasive, and deeply ingrained, even in the Feminist women attempting to subvert it. Heterosexual relationships, for the most part, unknowingly reinforce it. Commerce, and its retinue of marketing, advertising, and entertainment reinforce it. Even our language trips us up and traps us in gendered cul-de-sacs. Having a banner to rally under that does not linguistically trigger male defense mechanisms against being perceived as threateningly “not-manly” would give all kinds of men the cover to do the kind of work that needs to be done among men.

I am, by no means, a linguist, but I was often baffled by those who laughed off or criticized my early arguments that men who support Feminism shouldn’t call themselves Feminists. In their efforts at greater inclusion and acceptance of women, Feminists have made great arguments that show how the language of Patriarchy itself works to suppress them, but the idea that men who support the destruction of the Patriarchy should call themselves something other than Feminists hasn’t really caught on, or been accepted. Maybe they thought I was saying men should take Feminist works and philosophy and simply slap butch new covers on those texts – like when Dr. Pepper pushed their low-calorie version as a “manly” diet drink by putting it in a gray can – rather than have men do their own work and thinking for themselves on the issues of gender conformity, and the ugliness of toxic masculinity. Certainly, men should make themselves aware of Feminist thinking, but they’re not going to be successful at breaking down the Patriarchy if they simply regurgitate it. We have to do our own work, and my question is what do we call that work when it’s not focused on what women want to achieve concerning the value of womanhood, but what men want to achieve concerning new ways to value manhood?

For Feminists, embracing certain masculine traits to fight the Patriarchy is a good thing. Within the strict divisions that are built into Patriarchy, claiming the prized human traits reserved for men is empowering. When a woman stands up to the Patriarchy and shows she can be just as assertive, strong, knowledgable, and skilled, it advances the cause – even though the Patriarchy will try to label her a bitch, or a whore, or a man-hater. It’s hard, but embracing the strength that was once denied women permanently carves out that spot for the next woman. The reverse, however, is not as true for men – or at least it doesn’t feel true when it comes to men embracing the human traits that Patriarchy has denied them and defined as weak and undesirable for men. Yes, we’re getting better at accepting certain types of non-traditional men, like stay-at-home dads, and gay men, but it’s progressing at a much slower rate. And this haphazard, micro-approach provides little to no support or armor for those straight men who appear to lead lives wrapped up in traditional gender roles, but who wear those vestments awkwardly, or even painfully, and want a way out.

Stepping out of the traditional, public roles that men have held is usually done alone. Those men who leave the traditional masculine gender structure behind then have little or infrequent contact with the men who are still enmeshed in the Patriarchy. When they do, it’s often rife with insults and misunderstanding. In fact, for stay-at-home dads, it really doesn’t matter what they call themselves because the situation itself is coded (see stories linked below). So, where does that leave the men who support the destruction of the Patriarchy, but wear business casual, or tool belts and hard hats, or badges, or an expensive suit to work but aren’t “the boss?” A person could work through Human Resources departments, anonymous call-in lines, and trust in non-retaliation clauses to fight individual acts of sexism and injustice, but that does very little to change the status quo. How do men who support an end to the Patriarchy collect and advance the hard work of shattering men’s silence into a cohesive body of work that will allow them to talk about the ways the Patriarchy cripples, demeans and dehumanizes us, so that we can make a concerted effort to stop turning into monsters and potential threats to women and children?

Those with power, status and privilege, and who are invested in keeping it, won’t give up their power without a fight. When a system is set up to automatically grant privilege and power to one group (straight white men), and set up to maintain that structure by devaluing everything that might subvert it, then those in the power position will perceive any change in their status as a loss, a defeat, and a diminishment rather than a gift. In the Patriarchal system, it’s very function is to force men to run away from weakness, to fight it, repress it, and in that dynamic, it makes sense to men that women would want to “give up” their weakened position as “not-men.” So, a lot of men resist the changes proposed by Feminism because, within the Patriarchal dynamic, anything that is not manly is weak, shameful, degraded, and even though they might see that the Patriarchy hurts them, the hurt is made endurable by a combination of the rewards Patriarchy bestows upon them, and the humiliation they feel they’ll have to endure for failing to live up to those demands.

Women and Feminism are doing a fine job of defining “womanhood” for themselves and claiming the aspects of humanity that the Patriarchy attempts to deny them. However, it’s not their job to then define manhood for men. Feminism’s very existence requires that men have discussions among themselves about what manhood should be now that womanhood has become something new. Since Patriarchy is a reactionary structure that relies upon strict gender divisions, we have to acknowledge that there is also a strict linguistic division to that structure. That means that no matter how developed and nuanced Feminist thought is in relation to gender differences, men locked up in the Patriarchal construct are going to automatically react in a negative way to the word “Feminism” even when it comes out of another man’s mouth. The Patriarchy’s very nature means it will condescend to a woman demanding equality, and the two sides of ambivalent sexism will swing into action to attempt to control her. Hostile sexism, the rape culture, will attempt to keep her in line with threats of violence, while benevolent sexism will concern troll her into silence by pointing at hostile sexism and claiming to protect her from that if she’ll just obey him. These same tactics are used to keep men in line as well. Rape and sexual violence disproportionately affect women, but men are also raped and gay and transgendered men are still attacked because of their sexual identification, which the Patriarchy sees as a threat to its order. That means that straight men seen as effeminate are also threatened by this same violence if they confront the Patriarchy.

So, again, how do the men who support the destruction of the Patriarchy get past this reactionary defense system that goes to full, aggressive red alert at even the linguistic suggestion of “not-manliness”? Saying we have to make the word “Feminism” and the movement it labels more acceptable is accurate, but linguistically a challenge.

To get at my point, I want you to think about these words and your emotional reaction to them, without trying to rationalize the definitions: stink, odor, smell, scent, fragrance, aroma.

In modern English, they are often defined very differently. Stink and odor are often given negative definitions to match the emotional connotations you probably felt when you read them. Smell is mostly neutral. Scent, fragrance and aroma are given positive definitions to match our positive emotional connotations. However, prior to the Norman invasion, all English had were the words stink (from Old English stincan) and smell (possible of Old English origin, but not recorded until Middle English since there don’t appear to be any cognates in other languages) (http://www.etymonline.com/), and both were used in relation to good and bad olfactory experiences. Odor came to English from the French, where it also did double duty for good and bad smells. Scent was also from the French and was solely a hunting term until English adopted it. Fragrance came to English almost unchanged from Latin through French and always had a positive connotation. Aroma was adopted into English from Latin and Greek in the 13th Century, and became a synonym of fragrance by the 18th Century. These words helped us describe more precisely, a much wider range of olfactory encounters.

In Old English, we had two words and both did double duty to describe the two varieties olfactory phenomenon. Whether you were smelling a roast chicken or a rotting chicken, it stank. To differentiate what kind of stench it was, we had to throw an adjective in front of it – wonderful, or terrible. However, once English adopted odor, scent, fragrance, and aroma, we could relegate those harsh, blunt Old English words (stink, stank, stench) to the negative category. Our language, and our range of understanding expanded by relieving certain words of having to do double duty and allowing them to absorb emotional connotations.

In matters as rigidly formed and strict as gender in a Patriarchal system, it seems, at least to me, to be an impediment to rely on one word to represent the kind of sea change that needs to happen in order to finally break down a system that is built on separation. Look at all the linguistic gymnastics that are happening around gendered pronouns and words because of our awareness of transgender and inter-sexed people. The standard binary of he and she doesn’t work for them, and they are making a strong case that they shouldn’t be forced to pick one. So, why should we refuse to give anti-patriarchal men their own banner? Unifying the movement for gender equality and fairness under the rubric of “Feminism” seems, and perhaps even feels logical, rational, and reasonable from one standpoint, but Feminism – despite its obvious benefits to both genders- is a word and movement that is, because of Patriarchy’s gendered and linguistic divisions, saddled with an intensely fear-filled and threatening suggestion of impotence to a lot of males. Inherently, Feminism’s goal of allowing women to define what womanhood is, and can be, automatically generates the additional question that, if women become something more, something different, then what do men become? And with men virtually trained not to think about that, much less open up and talk to other men about what it means to be a man, telling them to adopt a term weighted with emotional implications of non-masculinity, non-manliness, and a movement that doesn’t seem to require anything of them but surrender, seems to be a hurdle we shouldn’t continue to force them to leap.

The question of what men should become, or rather what they must become in order to free themselves from the damages of Patriarchy is for men to determine, isn’t it? It’s not women’s responsibility, or duty, to tell men what they should become.

It is important that men have a discussion about changing manhood, and it’s important that we avoid violence and the tendency to fall into “benevolent sexism (see this entry on Ambivalent Sexism).” It’s also important that we not look to women with the expectation that they will tell us what we should become. We should, certainly, understand Feminism, talk to Feminists, and check our progress against theirs to make sure we are complimenting that progress and not undermining it or defeating it. But deciding what men should become in response to Feminism is men’s work among men, so, should we really call it Feminism when the first impediment to it’s acceptance is an inherently emotional and reactionary recoil from the unexamined emotional implications of the word itself?

From a transactional, economic standpoint, social change that doesn’t occur through force occurs through a perceived benefit to changing over keeping what a person already possesses. Patriarchy devalues the feminine. It elevates the masculine. Those two things, feminine and masculine, are only amplifying constructs of a Patriarchal social order that both cripples and rewards us by the degree to which we conform. Feminism has, for decades, made the explicit case for women’s expansion into and value within all aspects of human endeavor – empowering women from the home to the boardroom – but Feminism hasn’t, really, made such an explicit and detailed case for men’s expansion and value within all aspects of human endeavor – and it shouldn’t. Men have to make the case that it’s just as manly to be a stay-at-home dad as it is to be a CEO or a quarterback. Some are trying, but to me, it feels piecemeal, and even a little ignored.

So, what do we call ourselves? What banner do we fly? The National Organization of Men – NOM? That would be a joke in a heartbeat. In the early Nineties, there was the “Men’s Movement” centered around Robert Bly’s book Iron John and Sam Keen’s book Fire in The Belly. Bly’s efforts to examine manhood quickly descended into joke-land complete with woodland retreats of business executives where they pounded on drums in a circle while dancing nude around a fifty foot wooden penis. And Sam Keen’s thoughtful, philosophical approach only made small waves and was quickly overshadowed by it’s religious spin-off, The Promise Keepers, which has actually ended up pushing a Christian feel-good re-embracing of traditional masculine gender roles (a lot of your active male anti-choice champions are Promise Keepers). Then there came the Men’s Rights Movement, which does have a point that the courts disproportionately grant child custody to the mother, but has predominately become a haven for aggrieved white men who want to believe that they’re the new discriminated against minority. The Men’s Rights Movement is what happens when we don’t effectively address the emotional, connotative barrier that exists within the Patriarchy in relation to perceived gender roles and differences. Remember that, when someone has been disproportionately privileged, suddenly having to share that privilege feels to them like oppression, even though it’s not. We need to find a way to make the case that sharing privilege is actually liberating. The only problem is there’s no place to collect all of those arguments and philosophies.

Should we call it, simply, the Anti-Patriarchal Movement? Should we try to reclaim the “Men’s Movement?” Men’s Detox? Masculinity Anonymous? Manism? Masculinism? None of them really work, do they?

I’d encourage everyone to watch the documentary, The Mask You Live In, and then think about what you would call this hodge-podge of men, seemingly working in isolation, who are trying to defuse toxic masculinity. Some are working in prisons. Some are working in schools. Some are working on athletic fields. What shall we call them so that they and others like them can rally together to help change the definition of manhood?

quote: The word “feminist” can be used by men to falsely excuse themselves from that accountability. And that’s the reason why too many women in my life are more vigilant around men who call themselves “feminists” than men who don’t.
I think the first lesson in Better Male Feminism 101 is recognizing that feminism is a space for women. It’s true that men need feminism too, but men clearly possess more latitude in the social landscape. Male feminism is often about men advocating for a seemingly remote ideology that will eventually circle back to them, granting them even more privilegesthan before. Women, by contrast, often claim feminism not just as an ideology, but as a way of pushing back against episodes of sexism and abuse. But take it from this male feminist: The prize will never come. There is no reward for being male and not being a macktivist — it’s just something #yesallmen should aim for.”

In today’s conversation, I talk with Elise Blackwell about her family’s history in Louisiana like having Faulkner set his dogs set on her grandfather, getting in a car wreck with Ralph Ellison, and many many other things, our first terrible stories, her time as a journalist, why are Souther Writers such a “thing,” choosing to write outside of ourselves rather than autobiographically, the Naropa Audio Archives, and standing up Michael Ondaatje, and other things that keep our writing egos in check.

Elise is the author of five novels, Hunger, Grub, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, An Unfinished Score, and The Lower Quarter that was recently released by Unbridled Books. Her books have been selected for several end-of-the-year best of lists, including the Los Angeles Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the New Orleans Times Picayune. Her novel Hunger was the inspiration for the song “When the War Came” by the Decembrists. You can read more about Elise and her books at http://eliseblackwell.com

In my first interview in a long time, I chat with author Virginia Pye about her mother’s southern heritage, her father’s family’s missionary past in China, and his career in China and her faint childhood memories. We also talked about being a third child, and the first the first book she remembers reading, writing her first poem, writing with and without an outline, and early influence and writing the giant epic only find out it should be a short novel.

Virginia is the author of River of Dust, which was an Indie Next Pick, and 2014 Virginia Literary Awards Finalist. Her new novel is the just released Dreams of the Red Phoenix, from Unbridled Books. Virginia short fiction and essays have appeared in such places as the North American Review, The Tampa Review, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. You can read more about Virginia, and get her books by visiting her website at http://www.virginiapye.com/index.html , or go straight for the interviews and reviews at http://www.virginiapye.com/pyeinthemedia.html

If you happen to be in shouting distance of the east coast, you can see her in Providence, RI on October 7, Richmond, VA on October 11th, and Cambridge, MA on October 14th. You can catch all of her event details at http://www.virginiapye.com/virginiapyeevent.html

Today I talk with Chris Andersen about his mail car, comics, the importance or non-importance of reading fiction, television, and the bad ways we teach literature . . . and we drink. To be honest, Chris stopped by just to plug his new graphic novel, and we ended up talking for almost two hours.

Chris is a comics writer and artist who’s been making comics for over a decade. His work has appeared in Sonatina and Desert Island’sSmoke Signal. His webcomic The Ego & The Squid appears three times a week at doctorsquid.com. He also runs the outsider art blog True Deviance. Chris’s new project, for which he wrote the script, is Professor Dark (the artist is the mysterious Kang Le) and it is forthcoming from Sonatina, but by donating to the Kickstarter campaign you can get special gifts like other Sonatina titles and original artwork from Professor Dark.

In today’s episode I talk with Troy James Weaver about some real inside the Wichita metro area stuff, but then we delve into all sorts of things: the problems with semi-autobiographical fiction, a writer’s education, sticking with the Russian guy, Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria, Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan the role of small presses, having balls and starting literary feuds – and why he misspelled his hometown on the cover of his book.